On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:52:23 -0500
Haines Brown via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 17, 2026 at 08:13:33PM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> > Haines Brown via Dng said on Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:57:27 -0500
> >
> > >Correct. The working system has two SCSI drives; the non working
> > >two SDD drives.
> >
> > If they don't work why are they in there? Take them out to remove
> > the possibility that non-working drives are causing problems.
>
> I don't understsand. The latter are two M.2 internal SSDs. If I
> remove then then the systenm us not operable. I can't attempt an OS
> installation.
>
> I insalled on a Seagate external drive, but same problem booting.
>
> > Like I said
> > earlier, you need to set up a test installation as simple as
> > possible. Once that's running, you can add things one at a time and
> > see what breaks.
>

> The external drvie was soemwhat of a test system. If I had a test
> systemm, installed Devuan its drive, what kind of things could ai add
> one at time/     

>
>

So what I think you need to do is remove all storage devices except the
target M.2 drive.

Make sure you download the correct file, should be named
devuan_excalibur_6.1.0_amd64_netinstall.iso if you're wanting
netinstall.

Use dd (with sudo or as root) to image it to the usb storage device. If
the storage device shows up as /dev/sdb, then the command should be
similar to:

dd
if=/home/haines/Downloads/devuan_excalibur_6.1.0_amd64_netinstall.iso
of=/dev/sdb bs=4M status=progress

When it's completed, you should be able to boot the target machine from
this device.

Do a fresh basic (all defaults) install of Devuan Excalibur to the
storage device you've left in the system.

Use the whole storage device, format with default partitions.

For network settings, only set up the network connected ethernet device.

At the end of the install, hit "Continue" (or whatever the option is)
to reboot into the new install, then remove the USB storage device when
the screen shows SIGTERM sent.

The system should now complete a boot into the freshly installed system.

This is how I've installed Devuan a whole bunch of times. I have at
least eight PC systems that I admin that I have installed Devuan on
using that exact process, at least three of them are on an NVME / M.2
storage device.

Let me / us know what happens.

Bracham