After spending two days in frustraion I finally managed to get the Debian Netinstall working from a USB pendrive. I actually wasted a lot of time with my corrupted MBR, so the crucial part that helped me was issuing the comand “lilo -M /dev/sda” on the machine I was preparing the pendrive on.

Other than that I fairlsy stuck to the instructions at the Debian Installation Guide, with the exception, that I used the testing netinstall image (from the Debian installer page) and as a result from that the boot.img.gz file from the testing branch, as otherwise the kernel images wouldn’t fit.

So far it seems like everything’s working. Network and harddisk were found and the installer is just preparing it for an encrypted LVM, so I’m pretty confident everything will work out alright.

Oh, by the way - in case anyone needs assitance with the installation from pendrive, or even a little help on PXE installations, I have aquired quite a bit of knowledge in that area in the last two days, so feel free to contact me..