Allan Duncan wrote:
Why not boot using a live CD/DVD (or USB image thereof)? I would normally use Knoppix at level 3 for this task as it gets the boot over quickly, and I use the tools from the CLI anyway.
If that is for hysterical raisins, allow me to recommend Debian's official live images. -- in this case, the "rescue" flavour. [0] At present only Debian 6 versions are available pre-built; sometimes there are testing/unstable weekly builds. The infrastructure to build your own custom images is included in Debian, and is reasonably turnkey as at testing. [1] If you are REALLY in a hurry, replace "live-config" with "single" in the boot options, which speeds it up drastically when booting old hardware. Many other options are documented in the live-boot and live-config manpages (see their respective packages). [0] http://www.debian.org/CD/live/ [1] live-build, live-boot and live-config The latter two are vastly improved forks of Ubuntu's casper. The former I annoyed me enough that I threw it away: http://www.cyber.com.au/~twb/.bin/twb-bootstrap