Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Install Debian testing or Wheezy (7.0) into Acer S7

Install Debian testing or Wheezy (7.0) into Acer S7.  Dual boot with Windows 8

The steps is not what I have done exactly.  What I have done is more complicated with similar solution.  Use it at your own risk.

1. In windows, delete data partitions and shrink windows partitions
2. Download Debian testing or Wheezy (7.0) netinst iso, dd it to the USB key
3. Goto BIOS (press F2 during boot), disable secure boot, set boot from USB
4. Boot with Debian install USB key, begin install
5. Before partition, go to console 2 (Alt + F2), activate rescue console
6. Run following command to backup

# dd if=/dev/sda bs=1M | gzip -c > <a usb hard disk>/acer-s7-sda.gz
# dd if=/dev/sdb bs=1M | gzip -c > <a usb hard disk>/acer-s7-sdb.gz

They are not too big, about 10G for each.
7. After backup, continue to install
7.1 When create partition, choose "Manual", create partitions on RAID disk, NOT sda and sdb.
7.2 grub install may failed, that is not a big issue. Just continue without bootloader until install finished.
8. Boot with Debian install USB key, get the rescue console
9. chroot into the partition you installed Debian into
10. in chroot shell, do

# mount -t proc none /proc
# mount -t sysfs sysfs /sys

11. install dmraid, kpartx

# apt-get install dmraid kpartx

12. Add i915 into initramfs, this will give you a opportunity to debug during boot

# echo i915 >> /usr/share/initramfs-tools/modules

13. Add kpartx into initramfs, becuase dmraid can not recoganize gpt partition table.  Download kpartx-initramfs-tools.tar.gz, extract it, then

# cp -r kpartx-initramfs-tools/* /usr/share/initramfs-tools

14. update-initramfs

# update-initramfs -u

15. install grub-efi

# apt-get install grub-efi-amd64

16. update grub

# update-grub

17. mount efi partition?

# mkdir /boot/efi
# mount /dev/disk/by-id/dm-uuid-part2-DMRAID-isw_xxx_HDD0 /boot/efi

18. install grub

# grub-install

18. All done, reboot, and bless