dinstall: Expert Mode for mount
Hallo Developers,
I recently tried to install Debian on a Win32 partition, which held an
1.3Gb file, which was mounted via loopback as ext2 partition. It was
impossible to do.
* What did I do?
I booted from the binary-i386 official CD. I choose color and my prefered
keyboard layout. I told dinstall to go without a swap partition. I then
changed to second console and was able to use dd and cat to generate a
file full of trash in /dev/hda5 an fat32 partition. I formatted the file
ext2, by answering yes to the question of mke2fs whether is should
continue its work on the file. It was possible to mount the file
containing the ext2 file system by supplying -o loop to mount at /target
(where hopefully the Debian system is installed).
* What´s wrong.
I then wanted to continue in dinstall by "Install Base system" but wasn't
able to do so: It complained it didn't find any recently mounted ext2 file
systems.
* Questions:
Is there a way to trick dinstall into installing without explicitly
mounting an ext2 partition (I am not allowed to use fips or partition
magic)?
Otherwise I would like to have an expert mode button in the "can't find
previously mounted ext2 partition", where you could mount "/" and other
partitions by "hand".
What do you think about it?
* Why?
I want to have a Linux system on my girlfriends system but I don´t want to
change the partition layout.
Maybe it is possible to add a "trial" install of Debian (without
partitioning) to dinstall later on --- even better as a system run from
CD. The only thing you would need is space on your harddisk.
:-)
Jens
P.S.: http://www.gedanken.demon.co.uk/linux/looproot.html
P.P.S.: Sorry Enrique if you get this message twice.
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