This is not a how-to, it's not for beginners, and I've skipped several steps. It's more of an after-action report of how I did it.

The advantage of this method is that it doesn't require a cd-burner. It's also interesting because it shows how it might be possible to boot an iso image from a hard-drive.

• Partition an 800Mb hard-drive into one 128Mb partition and one of whatever's left.
• Make an ext2 file-system on it.
• Get vmlinuz. I chose the 2.6 kernel
• Get the corresponding initrd.gz
• Get the corresponding iso; it's around 100Mb
• Put all three on the first partition of the otherwise-empty drive.
• Edit menu.lst, adding this stanza:

  title  New Install
  root		(hd1,0)
  kernel 		/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=12000
  initrd 		/initrd.gz
  boot
  

• Reboot, and select New Install

I relied heavily on the Debian GNU/Linux Installation Guide, but I think the Booting from Linux Using GRUB are incorrect. It's entirely possible that Debian has better documentation somewhere else.

The install was easy and worked the first time. I chose 'manual package selection,' Aptitude came up, and I chose some packages. Maybe from unfamiliarity with aptitude I got some kind of circular dependency. This probably could have been resolved eventually, but I just ran the install again. The second time after I chose 'manual package selection,' aptitude again came up. I didn't choose any packages, quit aptitude, and continued. Later I added packages with apt-get. This went fine.

I'm not really prepared to give a detailed review of the install, but I look forward to reading one. The last time I installed Debian I used debbootstrap. This was easier. Still, Knoppix's hard-drive install was easier yet. If you want a friendly install, plain Debian probably isn't the way to go. On the other hand, while Knoppix is easier to install, I've found it harder to maintain. Tom Harrison, 8 June 05