Tonight I learned

[flarenut]

that if you ask the debian installer to keep the data you have on a partition that you then want mounted, it will helpfully protect every gigabyte of it from the installation process by placing the files in the trash.

Oh, and that you can't use sudo to cd into a directory owned by root.

But I think the kid's box mostly works now. And he gets to sort the saved files.

Oy.