[Westwales] Debian and firewire drives

[Jon Pearse]

Hi,

   I went out and bought a 160GB firewire hard drive a couple of weeks 
back, largely as a backup device for my iBook. However, even if I 
imaged the iBook's hard drive and saved that to the external, I'd have 
100GB free... so, what does one do with 100GB free hard disk space?
   One decides that now is the time to have a serious foray into the 
world of Linux and put this stuff one has been taught at uni into 
practice, of course (I never claimed that I was sane). The idea being 
that, as the external drive is empty, I don't have to bother backing 
everything up so I could reformat everything. Having heard good things 
about Debian, I decided to run with that and annoy my housemates by 
downloading 4GB of data overnight on the shared DSL connection.

   So, I now have a G3-based iBook, a 160GB external firewire hard drive 
that will allow me to boot off it (I checked this before I bought it), 
a set of debian (3.0r5) install CDs, and four slightly miffed 
housemates.
   But this is where the problems start - Debian apparently doesn't play 
well with firewire hard drives, so when I got to the "select a disk" 
part of the installation procedure, the only option was the internal 
hard drive... and I'd rather avoid having to wipe that and reinstall 
everything later.

   So, does anyone here know how I can get around this and get Linux - 
of some variety - running off the firewire drive? The readme files seem 
to suggest that the only way to do this is by recompiling the kernel 
with additional drivers, which would require me to wipe the internal 
drive, and install Linux on that... not something I'm going to do at 
any point in the near future. Any advice as to how I could get Linux on 
the external drive without having to mess around too much would be 
gratefully appreciated.
   If there's no way around this, then I'll not bother and Linux can 
wait for the day I have a spare computer knocking around... in which 
case, if anyone wants a full set of Debian 3.0r5 PPC disks...

   Thanks in advance for any help.

-Jon

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  http://www.jonpearse.net                            jon at jonpearse.net
  AIM/Skype: JonDPearse                      Phone: +44 (0)78 1260 2710

  Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while
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