Bug#63132: Drivers not available if no partition available

[Patrik Rak <patrik@ein.cz>]

Package: boot-floppies
Version: any

Hi!

I have encountered this several times and I always thought it's
rather stupid design: There is no way to install the drivers
using the install interface until you have a target root partition
mounted.

This makes the install process rather complicated in case you need the
drivers themself to make any partition available. For example, I have met
with Compaq servers that have only the SMART2 disk array inside.
Installing Debian on such machine requires copying the proper drivers to
floppy first and insmod'ing it manually - not a very convenient thing for
a casual user. It's a shame because RH does all this automatically and
installs on such machine out of the box :(

The solution would be to allow for insertion of the modules even before
there is anything else available, through the use of the ramdisk perhaps.

Please think about it.

Patrik