How To Mount The Cd Image And Reinstall/fix Things?

[ZDevil]

Hi, let me bring more problems to the table.

[Scenario]
When some basic things go wrong in the system, like all the accounts (including the root account) stops to function. Tampering with /etc/passwd, /etc/sudoers, /etc/group, /etc/shadow, /etc/gshadow all in vain; like even apt-get and dpkg go on strike because of the confusion of GlibC and libstdc++,

I really want to go back to the CD installer to set up all my accounts and install the Base system all over again, but don't want to go all the way down to punish my doggy Z by reformatting the drive and turning over everything.

There is no bootloader like Grub or Lilo installed by default, so i can't do anything fancy like performing the magical "Single User Mode" ritual to exorcise the evil.

What shall I do?

Can I mount the CD iso image and get to the installer again?

I decoded the Titchy's updater.sh and removed the disk reformatting bits. But look, cdrom monuted to /hdd1. Oh, it still insisted on wiping my doggy Z all clean.    

Question: How to mount the CD rom image safely in order to install things again? Is it possible after all?
A zillion thanks!    


[Background of the story]
My 3200 mod had a nerve-racking experience over the last two days.
Overwriting a couple libs in /lib. System screwed up. Reinstalled a couple times. Segmentation fault at the last stage of installation. Reboot went fine and things ran. But packages got mixed up again when manually upgrading things. (  )

[Chero]

Instead of mounting the cdrom-image, can't the rootfs over here http://www.bigbridgezau.sakura.ne.jp/dev/debian/ help you out ?

[ZDevil]

Oh, yes, i forgot the tarball! Thanks! Will try that soon.

Still it will be nice to be able to access the CD installer as an alternative.

[ZDevil]

Got everything up again simply by extracting the tarball and copying back the important settings files (fstab, network, etc) from a backup.

I notice that the /etc/fstab in the "kurobox" tarball has already set to mount CD ISO image on SD to /mnt/cdrom. Perhaps there is a way to start the cdrom installer from there?

[tux]

Got everything up again simply by extracting the tarball and copying back the important settings files (fstab, network, etc) from a backup.

I notice that the /etc/fstab in the "kurobox" tarball has already set to mount CD ISO image on SD to /mnt/cdrom. Perhaps there is a way to start the cdrom installer from there?

  Can't speak as to starting the cdrom installer fom the SD card, but (/etc/fstab in the "kurobox" tarball has already set to mount CD ISO image on SD to /mnt/cdrom) the fstab on the original install also does that! I must confess I've never tried to access it though. Perhaps I should make sure to umount /mnt/cdrom before putting in an SD card and mounting it to /media/card? Doesn't seem to matter that I haven't in the past though!  

Cheers