Debian Installation Hell

[thobbs at rectrix.cx]

I have done this, not with debian and not with a laptop, but with mandrake and
an iopener which is now loading mandrake from a 2.5"(laptop) hard drive.

Especially with a distribution kernel, I had no problems booting on both
environments.  But I would recommend connecting your drive as hda on the
desktop, else your boot record will/may not be written to the correct disk.

Then I copied a usb->ethernet enabled kernel onto the drive, reinstalled in the
iopener and viola, a very tiny web browser.

-tim

Quoting C_Principe at telesalesinc.com:

> I have been having some fun lately trying to get Debian installed on my
> computer.  First the background:
> 
> Compaq Presario 4/25 (read: old!) with no CD-ROM drive.  I used floppy
> images to do the initial install, then grabbed the rest from the FTP site.
> Recently, I got a NIC card and, not knowing anything about modconf or
> something easy, I took the long route around of reinstalling the base
> system again.  *Then* I couldn't get the NIC card to work, and I finally
> got X running, so I decided to *reinstall* the base system again.  (This is
> the proof of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.)
> Anyway, I couldn't track down my original floppies, so I downloaded the
> latest images from the Debian FTP site.  No matter what version I use, I
> keep getting an error ("Error writing to disk: Success") that prematurely
> aborts the loading of the base system and attempts to extract an incomplete
> base2.1.tgz.  I am very frustrated with the floppy process and wondering
> about CD-ROM solutions.
> 
> I am nervous about trying to hunt down an external CD-ROM because the
> computer is so old.  I don't even believe it has a SCSI port on it.  I am
> wondering if it is possible to take the hard drive that I have, and put it
> temporarily into a computer that has a CD-ROM drive, and do the basic
> installation on that computer.
> 
> Has anyone attempted this in the past?  Any suggestions/solutions?
> 
> -
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