It is not letting me to open a new SSH connection for second tty. Tried with both root & dietpi users (and dietpi password) but getting ‘access denied’ error.
On tty with HDMI connection, clicked OK to continue with manual installation but it gets stuck at network connection stage with weird ping error suggesting unable to ping to 9.9.9.9 DNS. See the screenshot.
When you are connected via HDMI you can open a second tty by pressing CTRL + ALT + F2.
maybe you can copy the log from there.
But when I look at the screenshot, I see
ping: 9.9.9.9^M
which is not a valid IP nor hostname
So I guess you edited dietpi.txt in a windows environment, which handles new lines differently than under linux, which causes this weird ^M character in linux.
So you would need to edit it in some Linux environment
OR
some editors have options to save it in unix format. Like Notepad++ has this functionality
Well spotted and terrific detective work! I have been used to Notepad on Windows, didn’t have issues in the past but perhaps after lot of copy paste and edits it may have gone really bad with line breaks.
This is million dollar tip! Thanks.
I switched to Notepad++, saved dietpi.txt as suggested. The cleaned up file indeed worked on fresh install and auto setup completed flawlessly!
Problem solved!! Credits to @Jappe / @Joulinar for expert help.