

installation stuck in loop

we just got a new AMD64 box (ASUS K8V, AMD64-3000 I think) for a collegue. I
am trying to set up debian-amd64 on it with a blank harddisk, I'll install
debian-i386 or whatever else we want to run on it later. I downloaded 
sid-amd64-netinst.iso today (26-Aug-2004 09:41). The installation goes fine
for a while, even the german keyboard works, but I run into troubles when
installing the base system. It quits with some errors about exim4 and some
other packages not being configured, /usr/bin/awk already being present and
some warnings that /dev/pts not being unmounted properly. I think I can
ignore the /dev warnings, I can get rid of the awk problem by just removing
the file (it is a symlink to /etc/alternatives), and I can fix the exim4
problem by manually chrooting to the target system, adding a real entry to
apt/sources.list and installing libgnutls11. exim4 and friends are then
configured correctly. However when I switch back to the first console and
want to install grub, the installer goes one step back and installs the base
system again. Unfortunately it seems to overwrite everything I just
installed, and it is not installing libgnutls11, and thus exim4 can not be
configured. How do I get out of this loop? Should I just reboot and use the
CD as rescue image, booting from sda, or is there a better way to complete
the installation? I never get to installing grub...

I want to install debian-i386 too, maybe I should start with that instead,
but I wanted to give amd64 a real test by starting it from scratch with an
empty harddisk.


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