Hi, On Thu, Aug 01, 2024 at 07:41:53AM -0500, Richard Owlett wrote: > I have an elderly Sony laptop and a more ancient desktop with unknown > motherboard happily running i386 Debian 9.0. As far as I can tell the BIOS > of neither machine supports booting from a flash drive. Neither has > functional CD/DVD drive. Both hard drives have copious free space.
I would shrink the partition and then use debootstrap to install Debian in new partition in the available space, from the running Debian 9. Since you say it has a 64-bit capable CPU I'd make sure to install amd64 though, as i686 Debian probably only has one more release where it's available for booting, maybe not even that. https://wiki.debian.org/Debootstrap If the partition juggling here is too tricky, maybe you could: - take a drive out of one of them and put it into the other - debootstrap onto that new drive from the other's running Debian 9 - Remove the drive and put it back in the computer it came from, where it now boots Debian 12 - Once you're satisfied it's working, remove drive from the remaining old machine and do it all over again. Even though you say your machines can't boot from USB and have no optical drive, it seems likely that there would be a place inside them to attach another SATA drive which the Debian 9 would then see without any difficulty. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
