installing debian 9 on a hard drive that has debian 7 on it.

Hi
I am looking for some hand holding and sympathetic words on how to install debian 9 (per JT's post) onto a hard drive that all ready has debian 7 taking up the whole hard drive.
Do I need to repartion with gparted to get half the hard drive back for 9 ?
Or will 9 be able to load into the existing drive ?

Everything I search for dual boot allways mean windoze/linux

Thanks
Jim

If the wheezy LiveCD has Gparted on it, boot from the livcd or if not download www.system-rescue-cd.org/

Use Gparted to reclaim whatever you can from your disc then install Debian 9 as per usual, remembering to create the Debian 9 partition in the empty space. The installer should pick up the original Debian 7 install and put that in the grub menu.

After using Gparted I'd reboot into your Wheezy install just to make sure everything is ok.

AnnoyingMutt

Well I won' t bore you with all the tripwires I've tangled with but suffice it to say I am down loading the netinstall file and burning it. I am installing it on another disk by CD and will cross my fingers.

Since BigJohnT was using a Ethernet Mesa card and I am using a 5i25 do I need to do anything different??

Thanks
Jim

Well its been a frustrating Sat. I threw in the towel trying to get a usb bootable gparted and debian 9.5 to work and jury rigged a dvd player and a different hard drive up. I downloaded firmware-9.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso and renamed it amd64-netinst.iso. Installed same with gnome desktop and booted up, when to /etc/lightdm but that directory doesn't exist. Went to synaptic and got linux-image-4.9.0.6-rt and its show as installed in synaptic, but when booting it doesn't show in the grub menu. And uname -a doesn't show anything but the original image.
I tried running udate-grub but that didn't do anything.

At a loss, don't know what to do next???
At instalation i was given the choice where to put grub and I selected the lower choice which I thought was my /dev/sda .... but...


I added vim, vsftpd, openssh but openssh won't connect, port 22 won't connect.
but vim works nicely. Had my first experience fighting with iptables ..err

Not a good day
Jim

tommylight

I am using apt-get and apt-cache search and have located the linux-image, linux-header, but can't locate the linux-firmware??
Do I need to load another repository the only one I have is the one at the top of the list during install "ftp.debian"


IGnore below.
I installed and used apt-get for the update and upgrade. Do you use synaptic or apt-get for the images, headers and firmware? And I need each of them, yes?
And if I use apt-get how do I search for the correct files?


thanks
Jim

The install of the required Linuxcnc parts is done post install of the debian system.

The latest rt kernel is -7 (not -6 as per JT's instructions)The above will install the debug kernel but it's not an issue and can be removed later.

For the firmware (Linux only not mesa) you can select the following:
firmware-linux-free
firmware-linux-nonfree
firmware-linux-misc-nonfree


The required repos need to be setup to install the Linuxcnc parts (see JT's instructions)

When you installed debian 9.5 did you install grub to the MBR ? Or did you install it somewhere else ?

If you didn't install grub on the mbr you will have to boot into the previous debian install and run update-grub from there.

This some shed some light on setting up ssh if you are still having issues
linuxhint.com/enable-ssh-server-debian/

AnnoyingMutt

Well its been a fun several hours but here's where I am now. I have a debian system running and jogging the machine.
#1 SMP PREEMPT RT Debian 4.9.110-3+deb9u2 (2018-08-13)
How I got here is still a mystery to me but it was mostly by your encouragement.

I loaded the system into an old 160 gb hard drive leftover from some upgrade to my centos system 6 years ago. There are a pile of hardware problems but its running.

I have to shutdown the computer on reboot or it can't find the hard drive? o-well.
These errors show up at boot but arn't in the dmesg.
lvmetad - fail will scan for ....
KVM disablsed by bios...
These are repeated twice at one font size and then 4 times each in a smaller font.

But I can ssh and ncftp into and out of the box so that's good.

Thanks again for your help.
Jim

I need to put this note in for myself as much as anyone.

This was a clean install on a used hard drive over writing all data.

apt-get image then headers. header reported missing dependencies for "Bt3", that is as close as I can remember. But googling showed a "firmware" that supplied them so I used apt-get for that firmware and all appears well. If anyone knows a way I can display which "image, header and firmware" I used I will post that indo.

Thanks again
Jim

AnnoyingMutt

Now when I bootup the computer I have to select the second line down on the grub menu and then select the RT image. Is there a way to make it the first boot?

Thanks
Jim