I am new to Linux and have been reading and trying lots of alternatives before writing here. I am trying to install Debian10 (through NETINST) from a USB stick on a Laptop that normally runs on Gallium OS. I need to provide non-free firmware in order to use wifi, hence the other partitions.
My process is:
- wipe my USB Stick with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
- create partitions with fdisk and assign a bootable flag to the partition that will have the debian install ISO file (/dev/sda2)
- use isohybrid --partok on the debian-10.9.0-amd64-netinst.iso file
- use dd if=debian-10.9.0-amd64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sda2 to create the bootable Debian installer
- copy the folder with non-free essential firmwares into the other USB partition
When i do the same (without the non-free firmware) on an unpartitioned USB stick, the GRUB installer starts correctly with a graphical interface.
When i do the above (i.e. when trying to boot/install Debian from a partitioned USB) the system displays a GRUB command-line that i cannot use (despite trying browsing contents of the usbstick, i cannot find either vmlinuz nor initrd.img). I am not an expert of GRUB through command-line so maybe I am doing something wrong there, but I cannot get past this phase.
Ideally I would like to boot into Debian through a graphical intallation.
Could anyone see what may be wrong ?
Thank you! Jon
EDIT1: I would prefer to boot from a partioned USB so i can still use other partitions for other functions
