Hi. > Is it possible to boot to grub and in its menu choose between either doing maintenance on the > current hard disk or running the installer to install a basic debian > system on a new hard disk?
Last xmas i do something similar for some customers. My usb-key drive was so 'configured': - a multimedia distro: geexbox - a tiny debian distribution: DamnSmallLinux - a tiny System Utility distribution (Gentoo based): SystemRescueCD - a tiny Slack distro: Slack PopCorn Edition ..all bootable from Grub. And there was also installed WinPenPack to allow to run some GPL applications from Window$ without install anything. I don't remember well the way i do that, but all i remember is: 1 - install geexbox on the usb-key (you can do that with 'hd-install' option while booting geexbox); 2 - copy all the DamnSmallLinux, SystemRescueCD, Slack to the root partition; 3 - edit the grub (installed by geexbox) with the new kernel and verify device.map; 4 - personalize grub - background, timeout, default etc etc; So, the way i do that is installing on yhe usb-key a distribution that allow the boot via grub (not syslinux). >From that there was not problem. If you want i can share this usb-key image (only 512 MB!!), so you can look at that. Hope it helps you! Bye!
