How to prevent network autodetection in debian-install?

Question

I'm trying to use the Debian install media rescue mode on a Sun Ultra 10 so that I can use the shell to investigate an old SCSI disk I have.

It seems that the last version of Debian where a SPARC build was available with anything more than a netboot image was wheezy (7.x). I'm using a copy of the 7.11.0 DVD 1 ISO.

When I boot from the disc and proceed through the rescue install prompts I get as far as Detecting Network Hardware and at 0% the system hangs.

How can I disable network auto-probing?

According to the manual for wheezy on SPARC, the netcfg/disable_autoconfig boot parameter is provided for this purpose. However booting with

rescue netcfg/disable_autoconfig=true

at the SILO prompt does not appear to affect anything -- the Detecting Network Hardware step is still eventually shown and the system hangs.

A responder indicated that the boot parameter netcfg/disable_dhcp=true is documented in the F8 help on some install media (although not wheezy for SPARC -- it has no such help feature), however I also tried this boot parameter and had a similar result.

In search of ideas, I took a look at the example preseed file for wheezy, and it notes that the boolean parameter netcfg/enable can be used to entirely disable network configuration; however booting rescue netcfg/enable=false also had no effect. Perhaps the parameters just aren't propagating from the SILO prompt to debian-installer. Is there an alternate way to do this?

Answer 1

You can use the expert mode installation as a substitute for certain parameters that skip steps -- it goes to the menu before each step which serves as a confirmation, so you can skip network configuration by just never going to that step. If a non-target shell is sufficient for your rescuing needs you can launch it when any other desired steps are done just by choosing it from the menu.