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Re: Running debian-installer from the command line?



Geert Stappers schrieb:
On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 02:54:07PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
So... what I'm really after is a way to skip all the boot machinery in debian-installer. It should still do everything else (hardware detection, partitioning, base configuration, package installation, and whatever else I forgot to mention).

Have you tried to unpack the d-i image in / of the running system,
and doing a `telinit -Q` ?

No, I didn't know anything about the way that an installation system boots.
But it does sound like a viable approach. It didn't occur to me that installers might use the same startup machinery as a normal system (silly me...)

Um... telinit alone might not work, and there's some setup work involved. Let me spell out the steps:

1. Base system has / on a RAM disk
2. Partition and format the HDD as needed
3. Mount the future root partition on (say) /mnt/root
4. Download the ISO into / (or to /mnt/root if it won't fit into the
   RAM disk)
5. mkdir /mnt/iso, loop-mount the ISO to /mnt/iso
6. cp -a /mnt/iso /mnt/root
7. Shutdown most daemons. Particularly those that service any IP ports.
   (Other services, too?)
8. chroot /mnt/iso /bin/bash --login
9. telinit -Q

Did I leave anything essential out? Caveats? Pitfalls?

It's a bit late for me right now. I'll try this tomorrow, with any advice that I might receive integrated.

Regards,
Jo



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