[00:46] <phillw> Hi cjwatson is there a way to debug a perfectly working kernel that the installer states 'CD not present' which is pretty impossible as it booted off it.... The full suite is at http://phillw.net/isos/non-pae/ and the kernel runs well as it is running on that build machine... My thoughts are to a self check that defaults to that error message instead of a meaningful one that could be reported against.
[14:46] <cjwatson> phillw: that usually means that the driver necessary for *Linux* to access that CD drive (which is not the same stack of software required to boot from it) isn't built into the installer image
[14:47] <cjwatson> this is governed by build/pkg-lists/ in debian-installer plus the associated *-modules files in the kernel's build system that control udeb construction
[14:47] <cjwatson> in debian.master/d-i/ or some such IIRC
[14:50] <phillw> cjwatson: thanks, we can have a dig around.
[14:53] <phillw> puzzling, as I've used the .config from my existing 14.04 desktop
[14:59] <cjwatson> Did you rebuild d-i against your new kernel?  If not, this would probably be the first place where you notice that the modules built into the installer are incompatible with your new kernel.
[15:22] <phillw> cjwatson: yes, I used the new kernel (It just has the pae flag turned off).
[15:23] <cjwatson> I'm sure that breaks module compatibility.  You'll need to build udebs from the new kernel and rebuild d-i with that.  Good luck.
[15:24] <cjwatson> http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/CustomKernel may help although I'm sure it requires some adaptation for Ubuntu.
[15:24] <cjwatson> https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Modify/CustomKernel sorry