[H-GEN] Debian install floppy boot problem

[Jason Parker-Burlingham]

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Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> writes:

> [1] I don't know why people write installers that want to be clever
> with the display.  Plain text installers are easy to use and don't
> leave you in the middle of a dialogue about partitioning the disk
> where the important information is not visible -- that makes for
> scary stuff when installing onto a disk that holds two other OS
> installations that should not be disturbed.

Wow, I don't think I've heard of the dialog-based installer going
haywire before.  That sounds singularly unpleasant.

I've dealt with text-based installers before---getting NetBSD onto a
pmax comes to mind, as does futzing about with OpenBSD at some
point---and I'd have to agree they're pretty nifty.

That said, the box I'm writing this on was a somewhat tricky Debian
install because I wanted to change the root filesystem to XFS.  From
memory, I was able to boot a rescue floppy---I used rescue.bin, but
something like Tom's[1] might help you---to partition the disk to my
liking and unpack base.tgz.  From then on the install process isn't
too difficult to do by hand (although you'll need to copy a kernel
from whereever you're running it from).

As I type it I feel this is an inordinate amount of stuffing around,
but I think I remember the general outline correctly and am sure you
can work it out if you want to spend the time on it.

jason

[1] : IIRC it's called something like "Tom's root and boot floppy".
-- 
``I didn't program you for sarcasm.''

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