Installation

This may sound like a dumb question but is it possible to install m0n0wall to an IDE hard drive using the rootfs tar.gz file? If so, is there any documentation on this such as a quick start guide? If not, how can it be done?

This page seems to suddenly just assume you want to install the WRAP version (I don't actually know what WRAP is but I assume it is some specific hardware) to a CF card. This seems strange because it says it can be installed to an IDE hard drive and also because there's a separate quick start guide for WRAP so why does the "Generic PC" guide all of a sudden start using WRAP?

I ask because I have a small partition that I cannot lose and I cannot simply remove it and put it back later (it's complicated, please don't ask) so I would like to be able to just create a partition and extract the rootfs-x.xxx.tar.gz to it, but from the generic pc quick start guide it looks like it will be a lot more complicated than that (for example what do I then do for a boot loader?)

By the way, I have a few years of linux experience and many, many years of windows experience before that.

Thanks

This may sound like a dumb question but is it possible to install m0n0wall to an IDE hard drive using the rootfs tar.gz file?

No, blowing away the entire drive is your only option.

This page seems to suddenly just assume you want to install the WRAP version (I don't actually know what WRAP is but I assume it is some specific hardware) to a CF card. This seems strange because it says it can be installed to an IDE hard drive and also because there's a separate quick start guide for WRAP so why does the "Generic PC" guide all of a sudden start using WRAP?

Because the generic PC version is an unfinished copy of the WRAP version, which I need to fix.

Thanks, I ended up just going with pfSense anyway.