I seem to have a inherent disklike of Debian and the feeling appears to be mutual. It never makes my life easy. Just this morning I needed to install it on a Dell R210 rather than our usual Centos builds. The server is 15 odd miles away, so I took my standard route of PXE installing. After downloading the netboot.tar.gz and dropping the right files in place on my netboot server, I booted the R210 and began the install. Only a couple of screens in I was presented with this most unhelpful message. So I have to drive 30 miles to plug a usb stick into this machine to continue? That isn’t acceptable imho.

In my case it was the non free firmware for the Broadcom ethernet cards in the machine, I needed this package.

Turns out there is a fix. You just need to download the missing .deb, cpio it and cat it into the end of the initrd:

% mkdir /tmp/firmware
% cd /tmp/firmware
% wget http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-bnx2_0.28+squeeze1_all.deb</a>
% cd /tmp
% find firmware | cpio -o | gzip -c > firmware.cpio.gz

Now cat the resultant firmware.cpio.gz onto the end of the existing initrd.gz, which for me was in /tftpboot/debian-installer/amd64/initrd.gz. So I ran this:

% cat /tmp/firmware.cpio.gz >> /tfpboot/debian-installer/amd64/initrd.gz

That will overwrite the initrd.gz without warning, so might want to take a backup of it first.