Stuart Ballard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Sorry to reply to myself, but I've come to the conclusion after further > testing that my floppy drive is 100% busted and I'm not going to be able > to do anything useful off it. I also can't (practically) replace it. I > do have a fully functioning RedHat 5.2 installation on the machine and a > fast network connection, but it's one big partition plus swap. Is there > any way I can get debian onto this puppy?
CD? Install from DOS? Those would be easiest. But I'll assume those won't work. > I'm thinking of things along the lines of > # cd / > # mkdir redhat > # mv * redhat > # /redhat/usr/bin/tar zxvf redhat/base_2.2.tar.gz Ouch. Do you have a free partition to play with? YOu only need, uh, 150MB or so. > But then... > - How do I get a kernel? Install from harddisk option, is documented. The problem is going to be starting the system. I don't know what to say about this. Hmm. It might be possible to gunzip and loop mount root.bin and then chroot into it, invoking the busybox init. Never tried it though. > - How do I make the system bootable (is LILO in the default > install?) Yup, sure. > [Possible answer: mv /redhat/boot /boot, and just boot off the old > kernel - how much else would have to be preserved, though?] doesn't much matter... > - How do I get into the installation system? (presumably base_2.2 > doesn't extract to a fully functional distribution, or we wouldn't have > an installation program at all...) See above. > Note that due to the aforementioned fast network connection, there is no > problem getting stuff onto this machine, and it already has linux on an > ext2 filesystem, so it should be among the easier cases of this kind of > installation. On the other hand, the absence of a working floppy is > going to make life hard. Yeah, that's why non-sucky arches like powerpc/sparc etc have openfirmware and better support for fully network installation. > One *possible* workaround would be that, since the floppy drive is more > "temperamental" than 100% broken, I might be able to get the rescue > floppy, at least, to boot. If I can do this, I can of course enter > "rescue" mode and mount my existing / partition as root, but (at least > according to the installation guide) you can't install from a partition > onto the same partition. Or, again, if you have disk space to play with, make a little dos partition, then boot from a dos disk and run the loadlin option... > What I'm trying to say is, "Er, help?" Good luck! -- .....Adam Di [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>