Re: Installing the Hurd without preinstalling Linux

[Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com>]

The way to do this is boot something from a floppy (or over the ethernet if
you can do that) that you can use to set up the disk.  There are
multitudinous things ot choose from.  The boot floppies from your linux
distribution of choice will almost certainly suffice to get you a root
shell on which you can run fdisk and mke2fs and so forth.  There is at
least one "linux on a single floppy" distribution whose sole purpose is to
fit useful things you would need to diddle your disk or fetch things over
the network on a bootable floppy.  http://www.toms.net/rb/ is one.