thank you for your good guide, i will keep it in mind. Though i did try to get it working since 7 hours now and i was successful with loading the system from another sd card (bare raspbian), then mount the external boot hdd drive at /mnt/usbdrive and then apt-get download `cat packagelist.txt` where...

i have done something similar. i added the debian repo the the sources list, apt-get updated' and apt-get upgraded... after doing so i rebooted and now i get all over illegal instruction. i can't login anymore to the system. i have set up an x86 virtual machine where my boot drive is now attached to...