Your system's first boot on its own power is what electrical engineers call the “smoke test”.
If you are booting directly into Debian, and the system doesn't start
up, either use your original installation boot media, or insert the
custom boot floppy if you have one, and reset your system. This way,
you will probably need to add some boot arguments like
root=, where
rootroot is your root partition, such as
/dev/sda1.
If you have just performed a diskless install on a BVM or Motorola
VMEbus machine: once the system has loaded the
tftplilo program from the TFTP server, from the
LILO Boot: prompt enter one of:
b6000 followed by Enter
to boot a BVME 4000/6000
b162 followed by Enter
to boot an MVME162
b167 followed by Enter
to boot an MVME166/167
Go to the directory containing the installation files and start up the
Penguin booter, holding down the
command key. Go to the
Settings dialogue (command-T), and locate
the kernel options line which should look like
root=/dev/ram video=font:VGA8x16 or similar.
You need to change the entry to
root=/dev/.
Replace the yyyyyyyy with the Linux name of the
partition onto which you installed the system
(e.g. /dev/sda1); you wrote this down earlier.
The video=font:VGA8x8 is recommended especially
for users with tiny screens. The kernel would pick a prettier (6x11)
font but the console driver for this font can hang the machine, so
using 8x16 or 8x8 is safer at this stage. You can change this at any
time.
If you don't want to start GNU/Linux immediately each time you start,
uncheck the Auto Boot option. Save your
settings in the Prefs file using the
Save Settings As Default option.
Now select Boot Now (command-B) to start your
freshly installed GNU/Linux instead of the RAMdisk installer system.
Debian should boot, and you should see the same messages as when you first booted the installation system, followed by some new messages.