Installing a distro through another distro w/o anything to boot with
 

Ok ... here's the situation: I'm at my friend's place with no floppies, CDRs, or flash media. I would like to install debian sarge on this computer that I am using without having anything to boot from other than a hard drive and a burned CD of DSL. DSL is on my hard disk at the moment, but I don't care to use and abuse it to get debian on here, and there isn't any data that I care to save.

SO! What do you guys think about this? Is this do-able? The hard drive is formatted as ext3 right now, and I would like to format it as reiserfs when I install debian. I have a 512MB cache and 212MB of RAM, so perhaps I could boot DSL, (slowly) put the first debian CD into RAM + cache, then somehow initiate the installer within live DSL where I will format off the hard drive and get to the point where the data and bootloader is on there, then restart? Not too sure how to carry this one out if it would even work to begin with (although I have a real good general idea).

Or maybe somehow initiate a network (internet) install of debian within live DSL? That sounds a lot more practical. Still don't really know what to do though :P

I'm up to trying it a few times until possible success if you guys are willing to help me out!

yes... you can install a debian from scratch... it's almost like a gentoo install with debootstrap and stuff.

You should be able to cipher through this guide and use it to get a debian system running. The document actually focusses on converting another linux box to a debian box, without physical access to it (i.e. - you have a dedicated server running Fedora, and you want to install Debian on it). I have been wanting to do this, just haven't gotten around to it.

http://www.underhanded.org/papers/de...remotedeb.html

Of course you could also install Gentoo easily..just follow the official gentoo installation guide :P

Good Luck!

Ahh yeaaahh ... I Googled a bit and found this one too:

http://www.inittab.de/manuals/debootstrap.html

I'm on it right now :) I have high hopes for this one

Ugh ... debootstrap didn't work as well as it could have. I found some CDRs around my friend's house and I burned a network install disc of debian. Installed great, even if I lost some kudo points :)

Thanks for looking!