A.2. Booting the installer

The debian-cd team provides builds of CD images using debian-installer on the Debian CD page. For more information on where to get CDs, see Section 4.1, “Official Debian GNU/Linux CD/DVD-ROM Sets”.

Some installation methods require other images than CD images. Section 4.2.1, “Where to Find Installation Images” explains how to find images on Debian mirrors.

The subsections below will give the details about which images you should get for each possible means of installation.

A.2.1. CDROM

The netinst CD image is a popular image which can be used to install buster with the debian-installer. This image is intended to boot from CD and install additional packages over a network; hence the name 'netinst'. The image has the software components needed to run the installer and the base packages to provide a minimal buster system. If you'd rather, you can get a full size CD image which will not need the network to install. You only need the first CD of the set.

Download whichever type you prefer and burn it to a CD.

A.2.2. Booting from network

It's also possible to boot debian-installer completely from the net. The various methods to netboot depend on your architecture and netboot setup. The files in netboot/ can be used to netboot debian-installer.

A.2.3. Booting from hard disk

It's possible to boot the installer using no removable media, but just an existing hard disk, which can have a different OS on it. Download hd-media/initrd.gz, hd-media/vmlinuz, and a Debian CD image to the top-level directory of the hard disk. Make sure that the CD image has a filename ending in .iso. Now it's just a matter of booting linux with the initrd.