wiki:install_debian/boot

Booting Into an Environment to do your Installation

The two most common ways to boot into an environment for installing Debian are: USB and Network/PXE Boot.

USB Stick

To create a USB installer for Debian Squeeze perform the following operations on a workstation already running Debian:

  • Download boot.img.gz.
  • Plug in USB stick (don't mount) - run dmesg | tail to figure out which device (e.g. sdb)
  • zcat boot.img.gz > /dev/DEVICE
  • mount /dev/DEVICE /mnt/
  • Download netinst ISO
  • Copy ISO image to /mnt/
  • Download BNX drivers (optional): aptitude download firmware-bnx2x; aptitude download firmware-bnx2
  • Copy the debs to /mnt/
  • umount /mnt
  • Done!

If you are running Windows, you can create a USB stick using Unetbootin.

Once you have created a USB installer, plug it into your computer and reboot. Depending on your computer, some combination of function keys allow you to choose to boot from the USB disk instead of booting from your regular hard disk.

PXE Boot

A network/PXE boot is a way to instruct your computer to boot from the network card.

In order to successfully do a network/PXE boot, you need another computer available on your local area network that offers an installation image over the network. This process is documented in a debian-administrator article and is generally for advanced users.

Last modified 12 years ago Last modified on Jun 22, 2012, 5:08:57 PM