Without a bootable CD

I wanted to mess with /, change things around that would have broken any running process. I wanted to move Gentoo to the side and install Debian on the same partition without having to decide what data to save or worry about repartitioning. This should have been an easy task of booting off Knoppix and going for it. I couldn’t find Knoppix.

Here’s what I did. Disabled swap and debootstrapped into it, changed my grub config and rebooted. Hurrah. Moved Gentoo into /gentoo and debootstrapped back into / and returned swap to its swappy goodness.

All went fine until I decided I could use my existing modules, (as I was using my existing kernel). Deciding against this a few minutes after copying them over, I tried to remove them. Please note that there’s more in /lib than /lib/modules. Alas! Everything was toast, I couldn’t start any processes. Rebooting with sash instead of init let me symlink my Gentoo libs into place. It was ugly, but it let me function enough to re-debootstrap into swap.

Next time around I followed the Debian way for making kernel packages.

We don’t need no stinkin’ boot CD!