[SOLVED] First time installing linux (Debian). Got this error. Please help
I installed it from the Calamaries Installer found in the LIVE USB ISO this time. And Instead of my primary hdd, I installed it on the other one. Works now, thanks for all of your support, dear nerds.
I dont know how you flashed the usb, but it seems like the installer is damaged.
Try redownloading the iso, check the file hash, flash the usb drive with balena etcher and reinstall.
Did you change the partition layout in the installer?
Interesting. Looks like perhaps your boot loader isn't properly pointing at your root partition.
I'm assuming you've just done the install and never successfully booted, yes? In that case, you can try to re-run the installer, or try rescue mode and try repairing the bootloader.
Are you doing dual-booting, or is this system dedicated to Linux?
Yes, I have not been able to successfully boot yet. I have already rerun the installer and tried every solution I could find online in rescue mode. Tried repairing grub too.
Looks like the installer and grub is confused about the hard drive order different in instaler and different while booting, both those drives could also have the same partition/drive ID making it confused, that could happen if you cloned/copied the drive in the past
I would say as a easy and safe solution
unplug all other drives that you don't want install linux
Install Linux (best by formatting whole drive) - it should work just fine at this point
After confirming everything works - connect the other drives back
If Linux no longer boots after adding drives then tweak disk boot order in BIOS
Absolutely not an expert or anything, but is it possible that the partition of your harddrive that you're trying to install Debian on (hd0) is too small?
Considering that it has a 2020 firmware, and is built by "to be filled by OEM", my completely unfounded wild guess is that the system firmware has broken legacy boot support. From other posts here, I gather you're using a legacy dos-style partition table. Try installing again with GPT/EFI instead.
It's been a long time since I last installed Linux on a two hard-drive system, so take this advice as "likely not necessary, but will probably fix your issue"
The installer asks whether or not you want to "replace" the existing OS or install alongside. And if you're fairly new to linux (like I was at the time) it can be tricky to see at a glance which hard-drive you want to install it to and which you don't.
So to be doubly cautious and make sure that didn't happen, I simply unplugged my secondary harddrive during the install so that the installer would automatically be reading the correct one. Then all I had to do was choose "replace" or "install alongside" without worrying about anything else.
The drawback to that was, once the install was complete and I re-attached my second drive, I had to configure it to auto-mount and do some work on that, but at least my computer was working.
Hi, it would be useful to know what kind of device you are installing on. For a laptop the model and make would be especially useful. If it is a PC then the drive configuration would be interesting (what kind of drive, how many etc.)
Ok, that looks like a fairly standard setup. I guess taking a look at the boot loader itself would be the next step. When you see the Debian bootloader you could try pressing 'e' to view what commands it uses internally to boot. The lines starting with "linux" and "initrd" would be most interesting.
Together with all the other information you've shared, it's not entirely clear why it has failed; at least to me.
If you're not married/tied to the installation of Debian, may I suggest installing Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Tuxedo OS or Zorin OS instead?
There are of course many other distros you could choose, but the earlier mentioned ones are 'stable' like Debian is. I thought that perhaps it was what attracted you towards Debian in the first place.
This works perfectly! Fedora actually installed like a normal distro on my primary disk. Since my primary is faster, I will remove debian from my secondary now.
Is this a desktop computer ?
Two hard disks can make things more difficult. How about taking the power cord temporarily off from the larger disk, then install, and if it's successful then turn it off and give the 2nd disk power again, and add that 2nd disk manually to the fstab as e.g. /opt/ as mount point.
I'd say grub is having trouble with your hardware (mainboard or disk maybe).
You could try to update your mainboard's firmware, or install another bootloader (or maybe just a newer version of grub). I'm not sure what the easiest way to get a different bootloader is. I don't think Debian's installer offers anything besides grub. Maybe other people can point to a distro where installing something other than grub is easy.
Because switching out the bootloader on an unbootable system (i.e. not from the installer) is going to be whole pain in the butt involving booting into a live usb, mounting and chrooting and god knows what.