Yet another failed Debian installation

Since ubuntu wouldn't upgrade I decided to try debian once again.

This is the report about installing Debian 5.02 over my old Ubuntu Hardy.

I downloaded a CD image with XFCE and LFCE on, AMD64.

The first interesting part of the installation is the partitioon table. I had a messy old system with lots of drives. I selected an unusued 80gb drive as a boot partition, since I have had problems with a too small boot partition earlier. I also reselected my big LVM partition as the root system, but left it as it is instead of reformating it.

The installer then asks me if I want to proceed with an unclean disk which has an old system on it. That is exaclty what I want, I want to preserve my data.

Then comes a Debootstrap warning.

Failure to run: chroot /target/ dkpg --force-depends --install /var/cache/apt/archives/base-passwd_3.5.20_amd64.deb var/cache/apt/archives/base-files_5lennt3_amd64.deb

Base system installation error: the debootstrap program exited with an error (return value 1).
Check /var/log/syslog or see virtual console 4 for the details.

Then I get back to the installer.

I can open a shell as the last option in the installer, and i check the syslog with tail -200 /var/log/syslog | more.

dpkg seems to complain about pre-dependency problem: base-files depends on awk. But it continues anyway. Then there are pre-dependency problems for base-passwd, which depends on libc6 > 2.7.1 which is not installed.
Last it complains about a bad sector on hda, but who cares I am not installing on hda, so that can't be the problem. I guess the problem is that there is a problem with the debian installer. Surely it should be able to install over the existing system without these dependency errors. Maybe it picks up some settings from the old system. But it shouldn't do that so early in the installer, it smells really bad.

Now I can't keep track of which version, Ubuntu or Debian has failed most times. I am really temted to switch to another gnu/linux. I won't overwrite my old data, if I can't find a gnu/linux installer that works I'll switch to a hackintosh.