Package: boot-floppies Version: N/A Severity: wishlist At the end of the installation process, a new "custom boot floppy" is made that mounts the newly-installed root filesystem. This disk is first formatted (apparently by superformat) with interleave 1.
Unfortunately, if you try to boot from this diskette, it takes about 10 minutes to load. Whatever is going on in the boot process takes just a bit too much time to catch floppy sectors as they go by, so you have to wait a whole revolution of the diskette (0.6 sec) to pick up the next sector. With 18 sectors/track, this mean over 10 seconds per track. NOTE: this is not due to a sluggish machine, as I originally suspected when I put Debian on a 100 MHz 486 system. It is still a problem with my new 1400 MHz Athlon system. I dd'ed the boot-diskette image to a file, and re-copied it to a floppy formatted with interleave 2 (use -i 2 as arguments to superformat). Now the system loads in less than a minute from the new boot-floppy! I realize it takes a bit longer to format the floppy with interleave 2 instead of interleave 1 (approximately twice as long, as 2 rotations are required to verify each track). But this seems a small cost, compared to the agonizing wait for the interleave-1 diskette to load -- particularly if one's setup is odd, so that booting from a floppy is necessary (my clonemaker put the hard disks on the second ide controller, so the BIOS doesn't find them to boot from.) A curious sidelight on this problem is that the *installation* diskettes read at maximum speed, without a hitch. In particular, the "rescue.bin" diskette loads in a minute. This suggests that whatever loader is being used on the new boot-floppy is wasting a lot of time somewhere; maybe the *correct* solution to the problem is to fix the loader installed on the new boot floppy, rather than change its interleave ratio. -- System Information Debian Release: 2.2 Kernel Version: Linux aty786 2.2.19-ide #1 Sat Jun 9 13:24:48 EST 2001 i686 unknown -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
