Thanks for the reply, Osamu. Believe me, if I had a way of networking this laptop, I wouldn't be doing an install from floppies! :-)
The results I described are the results after going through the debian installer from floppies. I haven't manually edited lilo.conf at all, I just followed the installer menu to install LILO to MBR. If I boot from a rescue floppy loading root from a floppy, then mount my partitions, and drop to a shell, I see the directory structure and files that should be there. The installer mounts /dev/hda3 as /target and /dev/hda1 as /target/boot. If I use "nano-tiny" (the editor that comes with the installer) to view lilo.conf, everything appears to be correct, but there is no "initrd=" line in there. Should there be? Also, if I try 'lilo -C /target/etc/lilo.conf' from the shell, I get a Segmentation violation error. Choosing "Make system bootable" from the installer on initial installation appears to have written LILO to the MBR, but choosing this menu option since then results in a screen telling me that LILO could not be written to the MBR (or to the first partition, for that matter) and that I'll need to create a boot floppy. I've already described the results from using the boot floppy. My goal for this box was to get Debian installed via Knoppix, but since the CDROM drive isn't behaving (I can't get it to boot from the CD), that didn't work out. So, I decided to try installing from floppies. I downloaded all of the required floppy images and used rawrite2 to create the floppies. The install went rather smoothly until I tried to boot the system. Thanks for any additional help you can provide. Robert >>> Osamu Aoki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 1/13/04 4:15:02 PM >>> On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 03:58:16PM -0600, Robert Aldridge wrote: > Hello list... > > I'm attempting to install Debian (Stable) on a Compaq Presario 1245. Welcome :-) > The CD-ROM isn't working properly, so I'm installing via floppies. I > followed the instructions using the Rescue, Root, 4 driver disks, and 20 > base-install disks and successfully got it installed to the 3.2 GB > harddrive. You should get network card or serial line PPP to do most of install. I think few boot floppy is all you need if you have another networked PC. > But, I can't get it to boot. I have the HD (hda) > partitioned into 3 partitions, /dev/hda1 is to be mounted on /boot (~8 > MB), /dev/hda3 (~3.1 GB) is to be mounted on /, and 128 MB at the end of > the drive is configured as Swap. I got through the entire install and > when it asked if I want to make the system bootable, I chose the > alternate (Make a boot floppy). After the boot floppy is created, I > chose the "Make the system bootable" menu item and wrote LILO to the > MBR. After rebooting, the red LILO screen comes up with 2 options, > "Linux" and "Linux (hda1)." The arrow keys don't appear to do anything. > If I let LILO timeout and try to boot the default entry, it just > recycles and starts counting down from 15 again. Hmmm... > If I boot with the rescue disk and type "rescue root=/dev/hda3", the > system appears to be coming up normally, but hangs. The last two lines > on the screen are: This means you have lilo not working. > VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. > Freeing unused kernel memory: 152k freed > > Then it just sits there. Nothing else happens. > > When I try booting from the boot floppy, it says "Loading > linux.bin........." for a very long time (several minutes) and then > says, "Uncompressing Linux... > > After a couple of minutes, it says, "invalid compressed format (err=2) Looks like your initd may be not configured well. * Which kernel image did you installed. * Do you have initrd="..." line in /etc/lilo.conf * Did you run lilo after editting /etc/lilo.conf > > On a side note, I think the CD-ROM drive is bad, but I'm wondering if > it may be IRQ conflicts or something. Please help if you can. Could be. Did you installed other OS. RH, Knopix, Mandrake, ... Debian's auto hardware support is not the best but you can always manually fix it.
