Thanks Ben for the advice and sorry for the latency. The steps you're suggesting are indeed more straightforward. However, the generated .deb packages still fail to install properly. I repeated the procedure on several fresh Debian 8.1 installations, using default settings in the installer, with the same outcome.After some digging, I realized that the root failure seems to first occur inside the running kernel (!!), during the dpkg installation. Below is the relevant dmesg output during dpkg -i:[ 708.498832] device-mapper: uevent: version 1.0.3[ 708.498991] device-mapper: ioctl: 4.27.0-ioctl (2013-10-30) initialised: dm-devel@redhat.com[ 709.089486] SGI XFS with ACLs, security attributes, realtime, large block/inode numbers, no debug enabled[ 709.095776] JFS: nTxBlock = 8192, nTxLock = 65536[ 709.108028] ntfs: driver 2.1.30 [Flags: R/W MODULE].[ 709.119640] QNX4 filesystem 0.2.3 registered.[ 709.190614] raid6: mmxx1 4992 MB/s[ 709.258663] raid6: mmxx2 5880 MB/s[ 709.326691] raid6: sse1x1 4514 MB/s[ 709.394717] raid6: sse1x2 5192 MB/s[ 709.462765] raid6: sse2x1 9530 MB/s[ 709.530787] raid6: sse2x2 11756 MB/s[ 709.530790] raid6: using algorithm sse2x2 (11756 MB/s)[ 709.530791] raid6: using ssse3x1 recovery algorithm[ 709.532132] xor: automatically using best checksumming function:[ 709.570816] avx : 20117.000 MB/sec[ 709.583698] Btrfs loaded[ 709.587963] fuse init (API version 7.23)[ 709.633347] EXT4-fs (sda2): unable to read superblock[ 709.634932] EXT4-fs (sda2): unable to read superblock[ 709.636302] EXT4-fs (sda2): unable to read superblock[ 709.638439] XFS (sda2): Invalid superblock magic number[ 709.641380] FAT-fs (sda2): utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive![ 709.641576] FAT-fs (sda2): bogus number of reserved sectors[ 709.641643] FAT-fs (sda2): Can't find a valid FAT filesystem[ 709.642860] FAT-fs (sda2): utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive![ 709.643015] FAT-fs (sda2): bogus number of reserved sectors[ 709.643080] FAT-fs (sda2): Can't find a valid FAT filesystem[ 709.648183] ntfs: (device sda2): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Primary boot sector is invalid.[ 709.648322] ntfs: (device sda2): read_ntfs_boot_sector(): Mount option errors=recover not used. Aborting without trying to recover.[ 709.648423] ntfs: (device sda2): ntfs_fill_super(): Not an NTFS volume.[ 709.650203] MINIX-fs: unable to read superblock[ 709.651596] attempt to access beyond end of device[ 709.651598] sda2: rw=16, want=3, limit=2[ 709.651600] hfsplus: unable to find HFS+ superblock[ 709.653236] qnx4: no qnx4 filesystem (no root dir).[ 709.654695] You didn't specify the type of your ufs filesystemmount -t ufs -o ufstype=sun|sunx86|44bsd|ufs2|5xbsd|old|hp|nextstep|nextstep-cd|openstep ...>>>WARNING<<< Wrong ufstype may corrupt your filesystem, default is ufstype=old[ 709.657400] hfs: can't find a HFS filesystem on dev sda2The EXT4-fs, FAT-fs, and ntfs errors seems suspicious, since the hardware doesn't seem faulty. Moreover, I ran this inside different virtual machines, all failing in the same way.Let me know if you'd need any extra information.