Hi; I'm a linux newbie trying to convert from Windows to Debian on a Gateway Solo 2500; it runs a Pentium II 266, 64 Megs ram. CD-Rom is disabled and I'm too cheap/poor to buy a new one, so I have to use either a HD or floppy install. I've got about 2.5 gigs on the first partition running (shudder) WinME, second partition unformatted 2.5 gigs.
For the problem. When I try to boot from the boot floppies, everything goes fine until it comes time to load the root into RAM. I place the root disk in the drive and hit enter--and nothing happens. That is, the drive fails to read from the floppy; the little "floppy reading" idiot-light on the Gateway's panel comes on, but the drive (which is a noisy little fella) is silent and its own read light never comes on. Then I get the error "end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00 (floppy), sector 0" repeated about five times; the fifth replaces sector 0 with sector 2 and then it asks again for the root floppy. Something similar happens when I try a WinME HD install; after it recognizes my partitions and says something about MS-DOS (I take it it's giving me a report on the first partition) it says "Kernel Panic: Unable to mount root fs on 01:00." I can't tell if this is the same problem or a different one; it looks to me like it doesn't like something about I thought it might be floppy/file error with the root image, so I re-downloaded the image both to the HD and to a new floppy, but that would only make sense as the problem if I got the error *after* the drive had been accessed. It claims to recognize the drive, though, since one of the things the kernel spits out at me is that "fd0 is 1.44" megs. Also, I worry it might be a problem with shadowed RAM. According to the BIOS when I boot up, it is indeed shadowed; the documentation says I should disable it, but I cannot see any way to do it in the BIOS setup. (The BIOS is an EEP revision 9.0, as far as I can make out). Any help at all would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Jason -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
