Dear Sirs amd Madams!

I am trying to install Debian 9 (x64 and 32bit) in VMWare Player 7.1.4 under Windows 10 and while installing I get following error:
Debootstrap warning:
Warning: Failure trying to run: chroot /target dpkg --force-depends --install /var/catche/apt/archives/dpkg_1.18.24_i386.deb.
Here is screenshot:

The same error occurs if I try to install Unbuntu. What am I missing???

Why are you using such an old VMware Player?

I do not know, it's free I guess, should I update it?

Why not VirtualBox? It seems to be used a lot more than VMware on home PCs.

Same happens on VirtualBox, that is why I've switched to vmwareplayer.

Hello,
I have installed Devuan Jesse that I updated to Devuan ASCII and Devuan CERES. This is Debian without systemd. You may try that (I have Virtualbox instaled for handling VM). I can try later today to install Debian too to see how it goes. In the meantime you could try Devuan if you don't care about systemd.

edit:
I downloaded iso from here
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd...amd64-lxde.iso

I hope that administrators don't mind me posting iso source. This is just for reference.

installation went without a hitch.

Possible differences:
1) you are installing virtualbox/vmware provided by your distro. Maybe buntu messed it up. I am using VB from Oracle.
2) your iso/network installer is broken
3) your VM settings are incorrect

I googled "debootstrap warning" and a lot of people are finding that formatting to "ext3" instead of "ext4" solves the problem.