I have a Nov-2010 Seagate Dockstar with the matching Seagate 500GB laptop disk that has been running fine since then. That's a lot of hours on the disk even in relatively light though continuous usage running my weewx weather station software on it plus a little file serving.
The last I touched it significantly was in Oct-2013 when I fouled up a squeeze=>wheezy update and had to flatten everything and reinstall (my old 'doh' thread is at
http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?3,14141,14141#msg-14141). I 'think' that I updated the stuff based on the bohdi rootfs as of that date, which my skeletal paperwork says was Debian 7.1 perhaps.
I also have an identical spare Dockstar that's been set up to match the primary one fw_printenv settings, other than addresses, and I'd like to get a minimal Debian installed to a spinning disk attached to this one, just in case. Problem is that other than hosing my primary box in 2013, I haven't touched this stuff in 6+ years and am lost re: how to proceed.
The spare Dockstar boots fine with no disks attached, and gets an ip address via DHCP fine. I can log in as root. I grabbed the fw_printenv output (available if anybody needs it) and other than the serverip+ipaddr values now being invalid due to the home LAN subnet space being different these days here, it looks somewhat familiar to me. I don't know how to tell what version of stuff is on the nand disk, but the date it was last touched was Oct-2013 if that helps.
What I'd like to do is connect up a clean USB laptop drive, either spinning or SSD, and install a clean Debian to it so that my 'spare' box would be a true drop-in replacement for my primary box if something happens. Unfortunately, my memory is long flushed on what's next regarding (a) updating the bootloader or NAND disk stuff, if necessary and (b) getting Debian installed to an attached USB laptop disk.
Reminder:
- I have a dockstar that has the fw_printenv stuff set up to try to boot off USB external (laptop spinning) disk, falling back to NAND ok.
- I have a totally clean laptop drive with no Linux partitions or content, consider it as if I'd fdisk'd it and deleted all partitions
- so how do I get Debian onto the disk so it indeed boots when the bootloader stuff looks there ?
I'd be happy to add to the wiki if there's no how-to-start-from-scratch docs someplace that I haven't found...
Thanks...