Tony's answer was really good but I would add one thing. If you can boot
the installer, you will almost certainly be able to run the operating
system. The installer might require more ram than the installed
operating system because it has to create ram disks to do the install.
Or maybe the documentation says you need at least 256Mb of ram because
it assumes you are going to use the graphical user interface. Yet
another possibility is that the kernel on the installer disk has a lot
more driver modules compiled in (as opposed to loading them dynamically).
I have a machine with 128Mb of ram running debian wheezy. But it was
upgraded from lenny to squeeze to wheezy. I probably haven't done an
install on it for 5 or 6 years. But I am about as sure as I can be that
if you can get debian wheezy installed, it will run in 128Mb. I also had
a squeeze machine with 56Mb of ram. I If squeeze ran in 56Mb, surely
wheezy will run in 128.
On 07/25/14 06:31, Martin G. McCormick wrote:> Thank you very much.
That did answer all my questions
pretty much the way I imagined. I am still not sure whether
there aren't more basic problems afoot. The system doesn't even
come close to booting up. One thing I did do is place a radio
near enough to the system to hear the noises one gets when
booting. There are whishing sounds and pops all the way from
start to the spoken login prompt. When I try the drive with
wheezy, there is a brief normal-sounding burst and then that
sickening virtual silence of nothing happening at all like it
isn't even expanding the kernel.
How I did this was to put the boot drive on a working
system and format it with fdisk, making partition 1 the primary
partition. I did set the boot flag which brings me to a
question. Does setting the boot flag with fdisk put a MBR on the
disk? This gave me a blank bootable disk on to which I used
rsync to copy the wheezy distribution from a working system to
the new disk.
I am not sure if the MBR I am putting on the new disk is
any good. Any MBR setting command that automates this process is
probably better than what I am doing with dd.
Martin
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John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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