Re: Setting up Debian on a mobile disk

On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 03:56:10PM +0100, Dan H. wrote:

like the subject says, I want to set up a Debian system on a bootable
external USB hard disk

Followup: I've discovered debootstrap and have used it to set up a system on
that mobile disk. I chrooted to that disk (using the procedure from the
debootstrap manpage) and installed a few additional packages with aptitude.
That sort of worked (there were gazillions of error messages about Perl
falling back to the C locale or some such stuff -- don't know if that
matters). Also what puzzled me was that the chroot system immediately wanted
to upgrade many packages -- I mean, all packages had come fresh off the same
server minutes ago.

Anyway, I then rebooted the PC and tried to boot from the USB disk but that
didn't work.

Then, back in my normal system, I mounted the USB disk and discovered that
it had neither a kernel nor a bootloader installed (that ain't much of the

So to fix that I wanted to chroot into my mounted USB disk again but was
rebuffed:

chroot: cannot run command `/bin/bash': Permission denied

WTF? There were no changes to that disk since chroot worked just before the
reboot. I also did the "mount proc" spiel, whatever that's for.

Thanks,
--D.


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