I have an external USB hard drive with one big VFAT partition. In order to run Linux occasionally on a Windows system, I'd like to maintain a Debian Linux installation in one big file (say debianroot.img) on the VFAT partition of the external hard drive.
I create the installation from an existing Linux system. I know how to create a loopback device for the debianroot.img, create and mount an ext3 filesystem there, and I can install Debian in the target location using debootstrap (for example). It's only the boot process that I'm unfamiliar with.
My bios supports booting from a USB device, so it should work to write a boot manager to the MBR of the external hard drive and start from there. But I'm not sure which boot manager is best suited (grub?), if the standard Debian kernels have enough options, if/how I configure the initial ramdisk device (initrd), and how I get the boot files properly on the external hard drive.
At first glance, the loopback root filesystem HOWTO seems to contain very useful information, but it looks outdated (1999) and it is not very specific to Debian.
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