Your Debian netboot suddenly can’t do Ext4?

If, like me, you’ve just done a Debian netboot install over PXE and discovered that the partitioner suddenly seems to have no option for Ext4 filesystem (leaving only btrfs and XFS), despite the fact that it worked fine a couple of weeks ago, do not be alarmed. You aren’t losing your mind. It seems to be a bug.

As the comment says, downloading netboot.tar.gz version 20150422+deb8u3 fixes it. You can find your version in the debian-installer/amd64/boot-screens/f1.txt file. I was previously using 20150422+deb8u1 and the commenter was using 20150422+deb8u2.

Looking at the dates on the files I’m guessing this broke on 23rd January 2016. There was a Debian point release around then, so possibly you are supposed to download a new netboot.tar.gz with each one – not sure. Although if this is the case it would still be nice to know you’re doing something wrong as opposed to having the installer appear to proceed normally except for denying the existence of any filesystems except XFS and btrfs.

Oh and don’t forget to restart your TFTP daemon. tftpd-hpa at least seems to cache things (or maybe hold the tftp directory open, as I had just moved the old directory out of the way), so I was left even more confused when it still seemed to be serving 20150422+deb8u1.