Hi, I trashed my harddrive the other day, and had to reinstall my system from scratch. I took a harder way, an I'd like to share my story:
I partitioned the HDD into 4 for hda1 /boot hda2 swap hda3 / hda4 /home and used hda1 as a staging ground. I used potato CD-ROM to start up my shell, and partition, and setup network. and to mount /dev/hda1 to /instmnt. I then used the command-line: I extracted base.tgz into /instmnt with zcat and tar. chroot into /instmnt, to get bash running, mount /proc munge /etc/network/interfaces, set up /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update and dist-upgrade to "sid" (for some reason) install debootstrap and gcc. mount /dev/hda3 to /mnt inside that chroot, and debootstrap woody /mnt http://your-mirror/debian chroot /mnt /bin/bash set up /etc/network/interfaces mount /proc mount /dev/hda4 /home adduser a normal user tzconfig apt-get install whatever that is required to compile the kernel apt-get install grub lilo- apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.19-bf2.4 (or something that I know will kind of work if I fail now) run grub shell and install grub in MBR compile kernel with make-kpkg, and dpkg -i the resulting deb. and reboot. It probably needs more than that, but after 3 hours or so of working, you should probably have a working sid system. :P and off you file bugs on packages that are missing dependencies, and which segfault with some packages missing, which you are bound to find when you start off with a minimal installation. regards, junichi
