Pivot Root Install largely successful, though side problems to overcome. Call for help.

External USB disk on i386 machine running debian etch.

Booting from CD knoppix 5.0.1

Partitioned USB disk with qtparted
1)extended 50GB
2)linux-swap 5GB
3)ext3 55GB

The request 'were to put grub' ('mbr' or 'root-partition') was unclear to me. I choose 'root-partition' according to knoppix.net (which, however, is affected by wrong spelling in commands).

Start installation. At the end, I renounced to create a floppy (WRONG?).

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Now booting from CD knoppix 5.0.1
At boot prompt:

knoppix single

leading to:

root@tty1[/]#

Therefore (unexpectedly), no need of 'sudo su' or 'su'.

Then the following commands at the root@tty1[/]# prompt:
mkdir /mnt/new_root
mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/new_root
mkdir /mnt/new_root/mnt/old_root
cd /mnt/new_root
pivot_root . /mnt/new_root/mnt/old_root
mount /proc /proc -t proc
init 5

led to 'Welcome to Debian at Knoppix'. Gave my username (not Administrator).

Now remaining problems:

No networking (even live knoppix did not network on my i386 machine, while on my amd64 machine it did). Trying to open konsole in order to command 'pump', message

'Konsole is unable to open a PTY (pseudo teletype). It is likely that this is due to an incorrect configuration of PTY device. Konsole needs to have read/write access to the PTY device'

(is any relationship to 'tty1' on prompt (see above)?

Then, from Penguin I asked root shell, though it did not accept the Administrator password with warning:

'The program 'su' is not found; make sure your PATH is set correctly'.

I'll thank deeply the smart reader who suggests how to circumvent the difficulties.

Your
francesco pietra