On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 08:05:38PM +0800, Brian Walker wrote: > When it comes to the part where I fire up the new computer for the first > time, IIUC, the motherboard BIOS will send the usual messages, then stop > in dismay. The next step is to format the hard disk. In the absence of a > CD of the installation, how should I proceed? I downloaded > byld-1_0_3.tgz, which gives a mini-distribution on one floppy (I suppose > I could use tomsrtbt as well?) - will that suffice enough to Brian, There have been a couple of good suggestions so far (with my prefered method being mentioned - get a friend to burn a CD and go from there), but if you are feeling particularly massochistic, I've got one more for you. This is NOT the easiest way. However, there's a good bit of throwing oneself into the fire that aides learning. I assume from your mentioning rebuilding a kernel that you have another box available. You could put the new HD in your old box and format it. You then use the old box to download the base system .tgz. Expand it onto the new drive. You have to run Lilo on the new drive (this takes some fanciness involving chroot). At this point, the new drive is bootable. Take it out of the old machine, drop it in the new one, and continue your installation using apt-get. The reason you get to learn so much doing it this way is that the installer doesn't guess any of your hardware for you. You have to know what you've got and how to configure it. But it can be a useful skill to have! A while ago I wanted to replace RedHat with Debian on my Sony Vaio Laptop. I had neither a floppy nor a CD drive; only network and the internal HD. It was an adventure. I used the swap partition as a temporarily bootable partition so that I could work with the other partitions and complete the reinstall. Although I actually never did get my wireless card working right after that... ;) -ben -- Ben Hartshorne email: ben@hartshorne.net http://ben.hartshorne.net
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