> > Are there any tests I can do which don't involve nuking my system? > > Hook up a spare hard drive?
What I usually do for testing the installation procedure is borrow my swap partition for the purpose. Of course that means the installation itself has to work without swap. When I did this on a machine with only 8 MB memory a horrific inefficiency in "depmod -a" was revealed. I sent a patch, but the whole package is being rewritten in C++, apparently, so probably my patch is useless and the next version of modutils will be even more inefficient ... (With my modutils patch it is possible to install i386 Debian with 8 MB memory and no swap, by the way!) Edmund