I finally got a second computer I can dedicate to linux, leaving my wife with WinXP, and all of it's glories. Here's my question,

I have a small, 6GB hard drive, that has only one partition on it, formatted as FAT32. I downloaded all of the debian iso's, but I don't trust my burner to create the cd's accurately, so I extracted all of the files from the iso's into appropriate directories on the 6GB hard drive (IE: \deb\disk1 ; \deb\disk2 etc...) If I burn the first CD, and then tell the installer to look at /dev/hdb1/deb/ for the files, will it find them all, or do I need to reorganize them into one larger directory??

Thanks
Smee

I forgot to mention that the install itself will occur on an 80GB harddrive, leaving me with plenty of room to play around, I'll probably just leave the smaller one in as a resource for keeping updated packages available, etc.

You didn't mention the version of Debian that you are trying to install. I will assume it as 3.0. Anyways, Debian installer will install only the kernel, kernel modules (device drivers) and the base system. All these are located in the first CD itself. As you already wrote the first ISO image on to a CD, you don't take the pain of pointing the installer to read from HD. Make a CD installation. But even you point the installer to read from the HD, it should work fine.

But once you got the base system installed, you configure your /etc/apt/source.list file to point to the debian directories that are present in your HD. You need not put everything into one directory. You can have multiple directories i.e. one directory for one CD image.

If you have the ISOs, you can still install the additional softwares from them by loop device mounting and configuring your source.list file apropriately.

For more info on configuring the source.list file do man source.list once you got the base system installed.

Precisely the information I needed..... thanks very much (and yes, I am installing 3.0 )

Smee