Re: Setting up Debian on a mobile disk

On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 04:47:20PM +0100, Dan H. wrote:
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).

yes, that's normal (at least in my experience, it's been a while since
I used it). There are no locales set up on the new system yet...

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.

That's interesting. What target did you install? you can specify what
version to install. Perhaps you installed an older version than what
was subsequently specified in sources.list?


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

yeah. debootstrap is architecture independent, so you have to install
a kernel and bootloader.


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

hmmm... what user tried to chroot?

A

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