David Sastre wrote: > You could also mount that PATA drive externally and chroot into it to > request that (or any other) info: You can also use dpkg's --admindir option so: dpkg --admindir=/mnt/backup/var/lib/apt --get-selections > packagelist.txt I'd imagine you could just pipe that into another dpkg, too: dpkg --admindir=/mnt/backup/var/lib/apt --get-selections | dpkg --set-selections -- Avi.