Debian Init Update (PVT)

Assumes you are initializing a single SD card for booting. You can also do SD card + SATA SSD, the procedure is similar except the boot partition is on the SD card and the data partition on the SSD. It's recommended to still keep the VFAT boot partition on the SSD even though it's not used at the moment, for forward compatibility reasons.

Make partitions

Build two partitions. Partition 1 should be 32M in size and of type W95 FAT32 and holds the kernel and device tree. Partition 2 should fill the rest of the disk and should be type Linux.

Disk /dev/mmcblk1: 3965 MB, 3965190144 bytes
1 heads, 16 sectors/track, 484032 cylinders, total 7744512 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

        Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/mmcblk1p1            2048       67583       32768    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/mmcblk1p2           67584     7744511     3838464   83  Linux

Build filesystems

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk1p2 # make ext4 filesystem on the larger partition
sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/mmcblk1p1 # make FAT filesystem on the boot partition

Mount and bootstrap the filesystem

sudo mount /dev/mmcblk1p2 /mnt

sudo debootstrap wheezy ~/mnt http://bunniefoo.com/debian  # replace URL with your favorite mirror

Several minutes pass.