A hard(er) way to reinstall your system

[Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp>]

Hi,

I trashed my harddrive the other day, and had to reinstall my 
system from scratch. I took a harder way, an I'd like to share my
story:


I partitioned the HDD into 4 for

hda1 /boot
hda2 swap
hda3 /
hda4 /home

and used hda1 as a staging ground.

I used potato CD-ROM to start up my shell, and partition, and setup network.
and to mount /dev/hda1 to /instmnt.
I then used the command-line:
I extracted base.tgz into /instmnt with zcat and tar.
chroot into /instmnt, to get bash running,
mount /proc
munge /etc/network/interfaces, set up /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update and dist-upgrade to "sid" (for some reason)
install debootstrap and gcc.

mount /dev/hda3 to /mnt inside that chroot, and 
debootstrap woody /mnt http://your-mirror/debian

chroot /mnt /bin/bash

set up /etc/network/interfaces
mount /proc
mount /dev/hda4 /home 
adduser a normal user
tzconfig
apt-get install whatever that is required to compile the kernel
apt-get install grub lilo-
apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.19-bf2.4 (or something that I know
 will kind of work if I fail now)

run grub shell and install grub in MBR

compile kernel with make-kpkg, and dpkg -i the resulting deb.
and reboot.





It probably needs more than that, but after 3 hours or so of working,
you should probably have a working sid system. :P
and off you file bugs on packages that are missing 
dependencies, and which segfault with some 
packages missing, which you are bound to find when you 
start off with a minimal installation.


regards,
	junichi