Debian Wheezy installation with preseed

Question

I have a USB stick with netinst version of Debian Wheezy (testing). I am trying to load a preseed file, named "preseed.cfg" in the USB root folder (same folder as initrd.gz). I use GRUB and my entry looks like this:

menuentry 'Debian Wheezy automatic install' {
  linux /vmlinuz preseed/file=/hd-media/preseed.cfg auto=true priority=critical
  initrd /initrd.gz
}

Now everytime the installer starts it says cannot find file:///hd-media/preseed.cfg. Will continue with manual install". Do I have the wrong syntax? Also, I thought any file named "preseed.cfg" will be detected automatically.

Answer 1

Here's the line I used for grub1 when I was doing this on Lenny using CDs.

append vga=normal initrd=/install.amd/initrd.gz preseed/file=/cdrom/preseed.txt debian-installer/locale=en_US console-keymaps-at/keymap=us --

Other than the fact that you're using grub2, it doesn't look significantly different.

You need to make sure that the path you're trying to use is actually the correct path. Does the USB installer mount itself to /hd-media? I haven't tried this with Wheezy (yet) but that doesn't feel right to me.

To check, start up the installer then switch to the shell console (I believe it's 4, so press ctrl+alt+4) then look around the system for your pressed.cfg file.

The file path that you list must match the exact file path of the preseed.cfg from the root of the booted installer.

Answer 2

Could you add rootdelay=60 to your boot parameter, to see if it helps? Sometimes the kernel needs time to have USB devices detected, ready, drivers loaded and filesystems mounted.