Installing Debian, already have Bootloader installed

Hi, all. I've been using Plugbox Linux for a couple of months now with my Dockstar. I just purchased a new 120GB hard drive for it, and I'm thinking of trying out Debian on my Dockstar, given all my desktops and servers already use Debian.

I'm wary, though, of installing the bootloader again, given problems I've had in the past. I installed Jeff's bootloader a few weeks ago to get my Dockstar working again after my blparam got mangled. Everything is working fine currently and I can boot off of USB, so I don't want to risk damaging anything.

Since I can boot off of USB, I was wondering if there was a Debian install option for not touching the bootloader or Pogoplug environment, but only setting up the external drive with a Debian installation? That is, I just want to download the images and set them up on the external drive, without touching any of the internal memory of the Dockstar. I could comment out the relevant line in dockstar.debian-squeeze.sh (which I think is simply commenting out
/tmp/install_uboot_mtd0.sh --noprompt) but I wasn't sure if that was ill-advised or not. Thanks!

It no longer matters if it was ill-advised or not; I charged ahead anyway, and ran the installer from within my plugbox install. Commented out the uboot line, changed /dev/sda to /dev/sdb to match my second drive that I was installing Debian to, other minor tweaking, and Debian installed fine. Used chroot to install and configure a bunch of services I knew I would need, and now my Dockstar is running Debian, and to all appearances has all the same services as when it was running Plugbox a couple of hours earlier.

Now to figure out why / is mounted twice, once as rootfs and once as /dev/sda1, and how to get it to mount as ext3 instead of ext2 since that's how I created the filesystem....

Hi Arylander,

Is it too late for you to post the steps you used to go to a hard drive?

I want to do the same thing you did but I am somewhat of a newb.

Thanks
P

Yep, far too late at this point. :-) But it also depends on what operating system you're running now. I was running Plugbox Linux on one hard drive, and then wanted to install Debian on a second, new hard drive. But you might be able to run Jeff's script from the default boot environment (what you get if you boot the Dockstar with no hard drives or flash/thumb/USB drives attached, AND if you haven't installed Jeff's rescue system onto the Dockstar). I never tried it, though, as I ran it from Plugbox. But, I presume the default way is to be able to run it from the Dockstar default environment.

As it turns out, I would have needed a newer bootloader anyway, due to changes Jeff had made since I first installed, so editing the script was only really necessary to keep it from wiping out my Plugbox hard drive (e.g. when I mentioned changing /dev/sda to /dev/sdb in the install script).

So it really depends on what exactly you're running now, and what you want to go to.