>In attempting to install Debian 2.1 from resc1440
>floppy onto an HP intel box with SCSI disks that
>had run Windows-NT, I get the error:
> "RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0"
>and the boot stops.
>
That is a normal message stating that the kernel has found a root image
which is what you would expect it to do. The system is hanging when it
attempts to load the image from the disk. I would suspect a bad floppy, a
bad floppy drive, or a bad image.
Redownload resc1440.bin and rawrite it to another floppy. If that doesn't
work try another floppy drive. Here is a quote from install.txt
5.9.3. Floppy Disk Reliability------------------------------
The biggest problem for people installing Debian for the first time
seems to be floppy-disk reliability.
The Rescue Floppy is the floppy with the worst problems, because it is
read by the hardware directly, before Linux boots. Often, the hardware
doesn't read as reliably as the Linux floppy disk driver, and may just
stop without printing an error message if it reads incorrect data.
There can also be failures in the Drivers Floppy and the base
floppies, most of which indicate themselves with a flood of messages
about disk I/O errors.
If you are having the installation stall at a particular floppy, the
first thing you should do is re-download the floppy disk image and
write it to a _different_ floppy. Simply reformatting the old floppy
may not be sufficient, even if it appears that the floppy was
reformatted and written with no errors. It is sometimes useful to try
writing the floppy on a different system.
One user reports he had to write the images to floppy _three_ times
before one worked, and then everything was fine with the third floppy.
Other users have reported that simply rebooting a few times with the
same floppy in the floppy drive can lead to a successful boot. This is
all due to buggy hardware or firmware floppy drivers.
The first thing the kernel does after loading is initialize the system
hardware.
The kernel detects hardware via built in probing algorithms or by querying
the BIOS depending on the kernel version. The hardware it looks for is
based on options selected when the kernel was compiled. Initialization is
where most hardware problems are made evident. The kernel will output an
error and press on in most cases, but in severe cases the system may hang or
even reboot. This doesn't mean that if your kernel boots without errors
your system is free from hardware anomalies. It just means the kernel was
able to initialize your hardware and ready it for use. Forgive me if I am
being rhetorical here, using the shift + pgup or pgdwn keys at the console
will enable you to scroll the kernel's output for review.
The rescue kernel does not actually need to read any of the hard disk
partitions to boot-up since it reads the root file system, from the floppy
in your case, and mounts it into RAM. Disk partitions and filesystems are
handled by standard Linux utilities like fdisk and mke2fs usually during the
install process so the fact that the drive contains a compressed FAT16
partition is immaterial.
Hope this helps and good luck :)
