Is it possible to restart a text mode install that failed half way through?
All the software is installed but on cleanup the computer ran out of memory and the kernel panicked. Now I need a bootloader. Is it possible to restart the installer at the point where it installs the bootloader?
The system should really install the bootloader before installing software after minimal so that a basic level of functionality is there in case of an accident.
So I didn't restart the installer but I did everything manually.
From a rescue CD
Simply, mount the hard drive you have Linux on.
mount /dev/sdfoo /mnt
Mount special directories
mount /dev /mnt/dev
mount /proc /mnt/proc
mount /sys /mnt/sys
Chroot into the mount
chroot /mnt
Install grub
apt-get install grub
Install the basic stuff
/usr/sbin/grub-install /dev/sdfoo
Update the menu.lst file
update-grub
And you're done
Some caveats - a) I've never done exactly this so I can't promise it
will work b) I strongly question the wisdom of running Trisquel on a
machine too small to run the text mode installer.
Having said those the procedure will be something like
boot text mode install
get past select language and keyboard
Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get to the second console
Press Enter to start the Busybox shell
Then where /dev/sdX is your root and boot partition
# mount /dev/sdX /target
# mount --bind /proc /target/proc
# mount --bind /sys /target/sys
# chroot /target
# /usr/sbin/grub-install /dev/sdX
# /usr/sbin/update-grub /dev/sdX
# exit
# umount /target/proc
# umount /target/sys
# umount /target
# reboot
That's how I got around a failed grub install due to a screen corruption
bug with the Belenos betas text mode installer. But that was much later
in the process, so it might not work for you.
Yeah, my machine has 4GB of space. I suspect the actual reason the kernel crashed was that I booted the machine in legacy mode and the legacy BIOS code wasn't tested with Linux so the kernel mapped special hardware memory as usable memory which caused bad things.
So for other reasons (EFI support is flaky) I need to redo the above stuff with grub-efi but I also need to install grub-efi first. I need to get some network stuff running so I can do DNS inside the chroot and apt-get can resolve the archives.
How do I get the net stuff working as well inside the chroot?
EDIT: I'm using DHCP and a workaround is to use OpenDNS's nameservers .