&boot-installer-intro-usb.xml; &boot-installer-intro-cd.xml; To start the installer from Windows, you can either obtain CD-ROM/DVD-ROM or USB memory stick installation media as described in respective or download a standalone Windows executable, which is available as tools/win32-loader/stable/win32-loader.exe on the &debian; mirrors. If you use an installation CD or DVD, a pre-installation program should be launched automatically when you insert the disc. In case Windows does not start it automatically, or if you are using a USB memory stick, you can run it manually by accessing the device and executing setup.exe. After the program has been started, a few preliminary questions will be asked and the system will be prepared to reboot into the &debian-gnu; installer. Boot into DOS (not Windows). To do this, you can for instance boot from a recovery or diagnostic disk. If you can access the installation CD, change the current drive to the CD-ROM drive, e.g. d: else make sure you have first prepared your hard disk as explained in , and change the current drive to it if needed. Enter the subdirectory for the flavor you chose, e.g., cd \&x86-install-dir; If you prefer using the graphical installer, enter the gtk sub-directory. cd gtk Next, execute install.bat. The kernel will load and launch the installer system. To boot the installer from hard disk, you must first download and place the needed files as described in . If you intend to use the hard drive only for booting and then download everything over the network, you should download the netboot/debian-installer/&architecture;/initrd.gz file and its corresponding kernel netboot/debian-installer/&architecture;/linux. This will allow you to repartition the hard disk from which you boot the installer, although you should do so with care. Alternatively, if you intend to keep an existing partition on the hard drive unchanged during the install, you can download the hd-media/initrd.gz file and its kernel, as well as copy a CD (or DVD) iso to the drive (make sure the file is named ending in .iso). The installer can then boot from the drive and install from the CD/DVD image, without needing the network. For LILO, you will need to configure two essential things in /etc/lilo.conf: to load the initrd.gz installer at boot time; have the vmlinuz kernel use a RAM disk as its root partition. Here is a /etc/lilo.conf example: image=/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz label=newinstall initrd=/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz For more details, refer to the initrd 4 and lilo.conf 5 man pages. Now run lilo and reboot. The procedure for GRUB1 is quite similar. Locate your menu.lst in the /boot/grub/ directory (or sometimes /boot/boot/grub/) and add an entry for the installer, for example (assuming /boot is on the first partition of the first disk in the system): title New Install root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/newinstall/vmlinuz initrd /boot/newinstall/initrd.gz The procedure for GRUB2 is very similar. The file is named grub.cfg instead of menu.lst. An entry for the installer would be for instance for example: menuentry 'New Install' { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos1)' linux /boot/newinstall/vmlinuz initrd /boot/newinstall/initrd.gz } From here on, there should be no difference between GRUB or LILO. You will have already downloaded the floppy images you needed and created floppies from the images in . To boot from the installer boot floppy, place it in the primary floppy drive, shut down the system as you normally would, then turn it back on. For installing from an LS-120 drive (ATAPI version) with a set of floppies, you need to specify the virtual location for the floppy device. This is done with the root= boot argument, giving the device that the ide-floppy driver maps the device to. For example, if your LS-120 drive is connected as the first IDE device (master) on the second cable, you enter install root=/dev/hdc at the boot prompt. Note that on some machines, Control Alt Delete does not properly reset the machine, so a hard reboot is recommended. If you are installing from an existing operating system (e.g., from a DOS box) you don't have a choice. Otherwise, please do a hard reboot when booting. The floppy disk will be accessed, and you should then see a screen that introduces the boot floppy and ends with the boot: prompt. Once you press &enterkey;, you should see the message Loading..., followed by Uncompressing Linux..., and then a screenfull or so of information about the hardware in your system. More information on this phase of the boot process can be found below in . After booting from the boot floppy, the root floppy is requested. Insert the root floppy and press &enterkey;, and the contents are loaded into memory. The installer program debian-installer is automatically launched. &boot-installer-intro-net.xml; There are various ways to do a TFTP boot on i386. It could be that your Network Interface Card or Motherboard provides PXE boot functionality. This is a Intel re-implementation of TFTP boot. If so, you may be able to configure your BIOS to boot from the network. It could be that your Network Interface Card provides TFTP boot functionality. Let us (&email-debian-boot-list;) know how did you manage it. Please refer to this document. The etherboot project provides bootdiskettes and even bootroms that do a TFTPboot. When the installer boots, you should be presented with a friendly graphical screen showing the &debian; logo and a menu: &debian-gnu; installer boot menu Graphical install Install Advanced options > Help Install with speech synthesis This graphical screen will look very slightly different depending on how your computer has booted (BIOS or UEFI), but the same options will be shown. Depending on the installation method you are using, the Graphical install option may not be available. Bi-arch images additionally have a 64 bit variant for each install option, right below it, thus almost doubling the number of options. For a normal installation, select either the Graphical install or the Install entry — using either the arrow keys on your keyboard or by typing the first (highlighted) letter — and press &enterkey; to boot the installer. The Graphical install entry is already selected by default. The Advanced options entry gives access to a second menu that allows to boot the installer in expert mode, in rescue mode and for automated installs. If you wish or need to add any boot parameters for either the installer or the kernel, press &tabkey; (BIOS boot), or &ekey; then &downkey; three times then &endkey; (UEFI boot). This will bring the boot command for the selected menu entry and allow you to edit it to suit your needs. The help screens (see below) list some common possible options. Press &enterkey; (BIOS boot) or &f10key; (UEFI boot) to boot the installer with your options; pressing &escapekey; will return you to the boot menu and undo any changes you made. Choosing the Help entry will result in the first help screen being displayed which gives an overview of all available help screens. To return to the boot menu after the help screens have been displayed, type 'menu' at the boot prompt and press &enterkey;. All help screens have a boot prompt at which the boot command can be typed: Press F1 for the help index, or ENTER to boot: At this boot prompt you can either just press &enterkey; to boot the installer with default options or enter a specific boot command and, optionally, boot parameters. A number of boot parameters which might be useful can be found on the various help screens. If you do add any parameters to the boot command line, be sure to first type the boot method (the default is install) and a space before the first parameter (e.g., install fb=false). The keyboard is assumed to have a default American English layout at this point. This means that if your keyboard has a different (language-specific) layout, the characters that appear on the screen may be different from what you'd expect when you type parameters. Wikipedia has a schema of the US keyboard layout which can be used as a reference to find the correct keys to use. If you are using a system that has the BIOS configured to use serial console, you may not be able to see the initial graphical splash screen upon booting the installer; you may even not see the boot menu. The same can happen if you are installing the system via a remote management device that provides a text interface to the VGA console. Examples of these devices include the text console of Compaq's integrated Lights Out (iLO) and HP's Integrated Remote Assistant (IRA). To bypass the graphical boot screen you can either blindly press &escapekey; to get a text boot prompt, or (equally blindly) press H followed by &enterkey; to select the Help option described above. After that your keystrokes should be echoed at the prompt. To prevent the installer from using the framebuffer for the rest of the installation, you will also want to add vga=normal fb=false to the boot prompt, as described in the help text. The graphical version of the installer is only available for a limited number of architectures, including &arch-title;. The functionality of the graphical installer is essentially the same as that of the text-based installer as it basically uses the same programs, but with a different frontend. Although the functionality is identical, the graphical installer still has a few significant advantages. The main advantage is that it supports more languages, namely those that use a character set that cannot be displayed with the text-based newt frontend. It also has a few usability advantages such as the option to use a mouse, and in some cases several questions can be displayed on a single screen. The graphical installer is available with all CD images and with the hd-media installation method. To boot the graphical installer simply select the relevant option from the boot menu. Expert and rescue mode for the graphical installer can be selected from the Advanced options menu. The previously used boot methods installgui, expertgui and rescuegui can still be used from the boot prompt which is shown after selecting the Help option in the boot menu. There is also a graphical installer image that can be netbooted. And there is a special mini ISO image The mini ISO image can be downloaded from a &debian; mirror as described in . Look for netboot/gtk/mini.iso. , which is mainly useful for testing. For &arch-title;, currently only an experimental mini ISO image is available The mini ISO image can be downloaded from a &debian; mirror as described in . Look for netboot/gtk/mini.iso. . It should work on almost all PowerPC systems that have an ATI graphical card, but is unlikely to work on other systems. Just as with the text-based installer it is possible to add boot parameters when starting the graphical installer. The graphical installer requires significantly more memory to run than the text-based installer: &minimum-memory-gtk;. If insufficient memory is available, it will automatically fall back to the text-based newt frontend. If the amount of memory in your system is below &minimum-memory;, the graphical installer may fail to boot at all while booting the text-based installer would still work. Using the text-based installer is recommended for systems with little available memory.