Introduction

Sometimes we need to boot Linux without HDD e.g. if you want to experiment with HDD encryption, enable/disable it without causing damage to your data. For such cases we need a LiveCD which doesn't mount HDD at boot.

Creating Initial System with debootstrap

apt-get install debootstrap

mkdir livecd

debootstrap --arch powerpc squeeze /root/livecd http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian

We need a Linux 3 kernel with overlayfs support so we could create a tmpfs over our read-only base filesystem.
At the moment overlayfs is not supported on Linux 3.5 so it leave us with Linux 3.4 which doesn't really matter because all my Linux3 drivers are supported on Linux 3.4 just fine.
Furthermore we want to compile PS3 HDD driver as module because in this case we can easily change HDD region flags.