Try at own risk, assumes you have wired internet. Assumes 32 bit install and host has grub2 bootloader. The data-partition should not have a folder called opt, tce. My spare partition has no home folder but it may be possilbe, to use a separate host /home partition but not tested by me. On my host, the spare partition mounts under /a, which is non-FHS. Hopefully yours will be called /mnt/sdx, and mine is sda2. Steps could be modified if you use the multicore distro.

mkdir /a/tce /tmp/unpack && cd /tmp
wget http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/4.x/x86/release/TinyCore-current.iso

Remember to change mkdir /a – to whatever your pathway to spare partition is please

Become root eg sudo su or su, or prefix below commands with sudo and unpack iso to obtain some files

su 
cd /tmp
mount -o loop TinyCore-current.iso unpack

I won't attempt to create user tc or group staff so TC fixes this on first boot.

Now copy some files.

cd unpack && cp boot/core.gz /a && cp boot/vmlinuz /a
cd cde && cp -R * /a/tce

Not sure what your HOST defaults are…let's make the folder tce world read-write-execute

and readable for kernel and core

cd /a && chmod 777 -R tce
chmod 444 vmlinuz core.gz

Edit our grub2 file, change leafpad to your preferred terminal or gui text editor please.

leafpad /etc/grub.d/40_custom

Consider adding extra boot codes as well from TC wiki.

—————–copy and paste ———-

menuentry "TC hard-drive" {
set root=(hd0,msdos2)
linux /vmlinuz tce=sda2 opt=sda2 waitusb=5 showapps
initrd /core.gz
}

————end of paste……there is one empty line below the “ } ”

Change hd0,msdos2 (first hard drive, sda2) to where-ever your spare partition is.

save file and run

update-grub
cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg (to check it landed ok)
reboot

good luck