I need to do a reinstall on my system, but the netinstall disk keeps hanging on startup.

When I try running it without the "quiet" option, I see that it always stalls at the sata/scsi detection phase. It just stops and refuses to continue.

I've tried all the various installation options such as "advanced" and "advancedgui". I've run it with acpi=off, noapic, nolapic, and pci=nomsi (which the last few kernels have needed on this machine). I've tried two different versions of the installer and confirmed the checksums on them.

My box an amd64 with one pata and two sata HDDs and two sata CD drives, as well as a usb card reader. It's been running well enough up to this point. I'm pretty sure (well, at least I hope) that if I can just get the installer to run that I won't have much problem after that.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what options might be able to get me past this hang-up?


Edit: Woah! I just posted this thread, and one minute later it pops up on a Google search! Those indexing spiders work fast.

Which versions of the installer are you using?.
There have been lots of problems with the Testing netinstall disc lately.
Due to these problems i used the Lenny netinstall disc,installed a minimal system and then upgraded from there.
Looking at your sig you are aiming to use Sid?.
I've never upgraded from Stable to Unstable,as it's a huge jump i would upgrade to Testing first then upgrade to Sid.
I think it's worth mentioning that when i upgraded,after changing my apt sources to Testing i did the following:

aptitude update
aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude
aptitude full-upgrade

So that i did the upgrade with aptitude from my target release rather than Lenny's.
I'm assuming you would do the same to then upgrade to Sid
Apologies if i'm telling you what you already know!.

I used to have to use the "nolapic" setting during installation. Especially for single core 64 bit CPUs. There is a "Kernel in a Nutshell" book that explains many of these settings. It is available on the web now. That might help you fine tune the setting you use. The NOACPI will disable interrupt sharing and might even cause problems during installation. Expect some devices to not work if you use NOACPI. The dbusd and hald daemons won't run, which means auto-detection doesn't work either.

Yeah, I tried several versions of the sid and testing netinstalls and had the same problem with all of them. I don't thing it's just the installers though. I've also had problems booting with the last few kernel versions on this machine, and from what google has turned up there are a lot of people experiencing problems with sata on recent kernels.

Anyway, I finally downloaded and ran the standard Lenny installer, and it boots (probably because the kernel it uses is now kind of old), so I guess I can consider this solved for now.

And yes, after I finish the installation the first thing I'm going to do is upgrade it. What a pain.

@jschiwal. As I mentioned, I tried all kinds of combinations of nolapic, noapic, pci=nomsi, and whatnot, both on and off. I don't really know what most of them do, but I've needed them in the past for some hardware. I particularly needed the last one on this machine for the most recent kernels. But none of them worked for this installer.

I'll see if I can track down that book. It might come in handy.