I wanted to install Debian 12.5 on my old laptop.
Download Debian
I discovered the place to download Debian: https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/debian-installer/
Next, I plugged in my 64GB flash drive and followed the steps at https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/CreateUSBMedia.
However, it didn’t work. Well, it actually worked — I was able to boot from the USB stick and the Debian installation seemed to start. But as soon as I started the graphical installation I got a cryptic error that stated something wasn’t right.
USB Drive Must Be One Partition
I discovered that before following the steps above, the USB drive must be just one partition. I had no idea how to get my USB partitioned properly.
Partitioning The USB Drive
I found the following link which shows how to partition the USB flash drive:
That was really helpful because it pointed me to the parted app. Note: I used the gpt formatting.
However, I was a bit confused and didn’t want to damage other disks so I pointed parted at /dev/sda1 and that wasn’t quite correct.
Finally, I guessed and ran parted on /dev/sda (which was a bit scary — and I had no other USB flash drives mounted.
Drive Not Recognized
Once I did that though, Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS wouldn’t recognize the drive when I plugged it in again.
Determine Which Drive Is Which
I then found the following link that shows you how to determine which drive is which. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/506154/usb-drive-is-not-recognized-in-all-linux
I used the command:
$ sudo fdisk -l
to determine which one was the flash drive I was trying to deal with (64 GB).
Running that command lists all the disks and the last one looked like this:
Disk /dev/sda: 57.3 GiB, 61524148224 bytes, 120164352 sectors
Disk model: SanDisk 3.2Gen1
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 643B0225-84B1-<obfuscated>
I could tell that was the one I was looking for (by its size).
One Partition
That last command created one partition across the entire flash drive so I guessed I was set to go. Since the next command requires that the drive isn’t mounted I was ready to run the command to copy the iso file.
I then ran the suggested cp (copy) command and the sync command from the Debian install site.
$ cp debian-12.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso /dev/sda
$ sync
I went to my target laptop and plugged the drive in and booted up.
The Debian installation went great. (More about that soon — related to getting my account set up to be able to run commands via sudo.)