Perform hdd install then move back to live install?

[ESC201]

Hi all, I'm working on installing Compiz on BT3. However, I am having many, many issues. Right now I am trying to compile the Nvidia drivers on my system and according to some folks at the Nvidia forums and an Nvidia employee, the installer for the drivers will not work on a fat32 filesystem which is what filesystem I have BT3 installed to now. I have tried many times to simply copy BT3 to an ext3 and ext2 drive to no avail. So now the only thing I can think of is to do a full hard drive install onto an ext3 drive, install my drivers and then dir2lzm everything back up and go back to a live filesystem. My question: is that possible? Or what are the potential problems with this? Or anything I'm not thinking of? I'd hate to spend all the time doing this just to find out there's a fundamental reason it won't work and I was doomed from the get go. Thanks for any help.

[purehate]

Yeah but you can do that in the live cd environment. No need for a hard drive install.

[ESC201]

I get errors when using the live cd also. Besides, I've installed KDE 4.1 and a bunch of other upgrades and I'd love to do a full install and reinstall all the upgrades I've done since I'm starting to run out of memory on my flash drive. Thanks for letting me know it can be done.

[RageLtMan]

This is actually something i'm very interested in too - how would you do this? I've been running a real install of BT3F since august and i've added and changed a lot of stuff. To top it off a lot of my hardware isn't supported out of the box (i upgraded laptops and swapped HDs so BT3 came with the drive to the new computer) and its taken a good deal of time to get stuff running (still working on intel 5100 AGN wlan card).

How would i go about converting stuff back to a live install? just dir2lzm every folder in / , then replace the ones on the USB drive? Help would be appreciated

[purehate]

This is actually something i'm very interested in too - how would you do this? I've been running a real install of BT3F since august and i've added and changed a lot of stuff. To top it off a lot of my hardware isn't supported out of the box (i upgraded laptops and swapped HDs so BT3 came with the drive to the new computer) and its taken a good deal of time to get stuff running (still working on intel 5100 AGN wlan card).

How would i go about converting stuff back to a live install? just dir2lzm every folder in / , then replace the ones on the USB drive? Help would be appreciated

To my knowledge that should work as long as you have not modified the kernel. I believe it has to do with the squashfs kernel patches and another patch that allow for the live filesystem to work. Any give it a try after you back every thing up and see how it goes. I'd be willing to help if you runn into any snags.

[RageLtMan]

of course soon as you mention not jacking up the kernel i've gone and done just that. What a nightmare i've gotten myself into - price we pay for new hardware