On Tue, Jul 27, 1999 at 12:05:41AM -0000, Jordan Howarth wrote: > I am currently running Redhat and have decided to try Debian instead. I wish > to
yay! > install from the hard drive from an existing linux partition and have read the > instructions for doing this from > http://www.us.debian.org/releases/slink/i386/install but am confuse by one > aspect. > The instructions state that, "Note that the partition you are installing from > should not be the same as the partitions you are installing Debian to (e.g., > /, > /usr, /lib, and all that)". This is all well and good but how are you able to > use > that partition as part of the Debian installation. At a guess I would say that > Debian only requires certain partitions for its base install and then leaves > me to > add to the rest including the partition from which I installed. If so, what > partition(s) does the base install require? Technically, only one (well, two with swap) partition is required. You could have / with all else being simple directories underneath. This would work, but is not ideal (for a number of reasons not relevant to this discussion). Something standard would be /, /usr, /home, /var, /usr/local I don't have a separate partition for /var (and am regretting it because apt puts a bunch of stuff there). I also have a partition for /str (storage). Something like that would also work for you. If you have a partition that will not be essential for base use (like /str or /usr/local even) then you can use that to install the debian base system, then once you're running on the base debian system, you can clean the partition and mount it as whatever you want. Note: if, at install time, you don't tell Debian you have a separate partition for /usr/local/ (because you're installing from that partition) it MAY create the directory /usr/local/. I don't think that's bad -- you'll just have to: a) mount the partition as /mnt or something, b) mv /usr/local/* /mnt c) remount the partition as /usr/local and edit /etc/fstab If anyone knows a better way, I'd like to know it too! -Michael -- Michael Stenner Office Phone: 919-660-2513 Duke University, Dept. of Physics [EMAIL PROTECTED] Box 90305, Durham N.C. 27708-0305
