On Fri, Jan 06, 2023 at 03:42:48PM -0700, Fred wrote:
> ...
> Hi Ralph,
> I changed to the netinstall iso this morning since that is what you asked me
> to verify.

That's fine. Let's stay with that one use case. Don't mix in any
other. It's fine if you uuse the server iso or the netinstall iso;
they have the same installer software and essentially only differ in
the accompanying package pools.

> Why do we have the cdrom involved?

This ISO is of format iso9660 which traditionally is the filesystem
used for CD (though there are other). So when you dd-ed the ISO onto a
USB memory stick, then that memorystick has a first partition of type
iso9660 and a second of type vfat. The installer will use the pathname
/cdrom as mount point to mount that partition on.

The installer is a linux kernel, and it finds whatever drives it finds
with normal hotplug actions to build up the /dev directory of device
nodes. Apparently it will find the memory stick as /dev/sdc and the
first partition as /dev/sdc1. All that is due to how the BIOS presents
the hardware to the kernel.

> Earlier, I provided the results of blkid which showed /dev/sdc1 as type
> iso9660 and /dev/sdc2 as vfat and the df -h showed /dev/sdc1 mounted on
> /cdrom.
>
> ls /cdrom returns nothing.

That is peculiar given that df says it has been successfully mounted.
Or is this a different use case than the one with good blkid and df
reports?

>
> mount -t iso9660 /dev/sdc1 /cdrom returns failed, no such file or
> directory.

Did you verify that directory /cdrom exists? If it doesn't you'll also
need to create that.

>
> I put the cd3 iso on a new Sandisk Cruzer I bought yesterday and I can mount
> it on this computer and see the files are there. I can mount the sd/usb
> card I was using yesterday on this computer and the files are there.
>
> I don't know what to do. Shouldn't everything needed for the net install be
> on the sd/usb card with the installer?

Everything needed for net install is on the iso, yes. That which is
needed is split up into 2 parts: 1) an initrd that gets loaded by the
boot loader, and 2) a package pool held as a filesystem.

It's the same on netinstall and server (and desktop). Same installer,
but different pools and (some slight difference in priming).

Ralph.