On Thursday 20 December 2007 06:21, you wrote: > Hi Dan, > > I do have a usb cdrom drive I could use at install time. > But I would like to do a regular install on the usb harddisk, > similar to a pc with an ide, sata, or scsi drive. > > Would this work? Esp. important is whether the initrd provided > by d-i supports mounting a usb harddrive for /. Does it? I believe so but I'm not a d-i developer and don't have a USB drive to test. It "should" just use the USB mass storage driver. The real question is whether your BIOS can boot from the drive. If it can't then debian can't either (because the BIOS never runs the debian bootloader). You may be interested in: http://www.linutop.com/wiki/index.php/Debootstrap although I'm not sure why that approach would be necessary unless you have no way of getting onto your target drive unless you linutop is up and running (and you have no cd-rom, can't netboot, and can't partition the drive in order to stash a copy of d-i on it for the hard drive install method). From the linutop wiki: "...create partitions on the USB stick/Hard drive on which you want to install your system" certainly implies that you ought be able to use a USB hard drive. There may be issues with drive naming if you boot from a USB CD-ROM in order to install onto a USB hard drive because USB drives are all treated as SCSI devices, but when I last checked (quite some time ago) the names of the devices for a given device could change between reboots. I know this was being worked on, but I don't know if it made it into Etch and/or current testing images. Oh yes, if you boot the install from a key drive or usb cd-rom you may need to manual install grub to the hard drive. This is because grub uses the BIOS drives and may become confused by changing BIOS drives (which will happen if you change what device you boot from). Regards, Daniel -- And that's my crabbing done for the day. Got it out of the way early, now I have the rest of the afternoon to sniff fragrant tea-roses or strangle cute bunnies or something. -- Michael Devore GnuPG Key Fingerprint 86 F5 81 A5 D4 2E 1F 1C http://gnupg.org No more sea shells: Daniel's Weblog http://cshore.wordpress.com
Attachment:
pgpuN68kbA2nE.pgp
Description: PGP signature