I have a decade old laptop that is “working”, with Debian 4.x running.
It has working USB, but cannot boot from USB. Its optical drive is powered but doesn’t seem to work (I have tried booting several old bootable CDs and DVDs).
To top it off, in my attempts to pull the system up by its bootstraps, I mangled dpkg so apt-get no longer works. I don’t have build-essentials installed, either.
It does have network connectivity, so I can fetch stuff off of the internet.
Is there a way to “bootstrap” into a newer OS given the above restrictions? There is no important data on the computer.
I would probably have given up on this computer if it wasn’t because it is needed for a charity organization.
Answers:
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Method 1
You can start the Debian Installer from your hard disk. You can do a pure network install (which enables replacing your boot partition during the process) if you boot the netboot kernel and initrd (links for 32-bit PC), or you can do offline installation by booting the hd-media ones and also providing an ISO. This is described in detail in the Installation Guide (relevant chapter linked above).
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