Margarete Hans wrote:
I assume that no one responded to my original message because it was in rich text format so here it is again - hopefully in plain text this time. I tried installing Debian Potato, vanilla flavor, with floppies on a COMPAQ laptop, Contura 400C.
It has 20480 KB RAM, of wich 4 MB are on the System Board and 16 MB are part of an Expansion Module, an SL enhanced 486DX2 processor at 40 MHz, an integrated 387-Compatible coprocessor; I have a primary DOS FAT-16 partition (410MB), a primary Linux partition (50MB)(unformatted) and and expanded partition with two other unformatted Linux partitions(70MB and 210MB). The partitions were made with Partition Manager, a very basic DOS-utility.
I downloaded the disk images with DownloadAccelerator.
How did you create the disks? Did you use rawrite2, or did you have DownloadAccelerator save the images directly to the diskettes? You need to use rawrite2.
Upon inserting the rescue disk and rebooting, it checked the RAM, accessessed the floppy and then simply stopped. The curser was on the top row, blinking. I retried it a couple of times, rawriting it on different floppies each time.
I then tried it on my primary computer (DELL Pentium 166, 32MB RAM, AMIBIOS version A10 by Americanmegatrends, one 3GB FAT-32 Win95 partition). The same thing happened.
I assumed that the problem was that the file was corrupted. I redownloaded the disk image. This time, on both computers, I got a message that the floppy is "not a bootable disk". I redownloaded it a third time from a different server, with the same result as the second on both computers.
I tried the Compact flavor. The rescue disk worked fine on both computers, but upon inserting the root image disk, I got a message "invalid compressed format (err=1)<5>VFS: insert root floppy and press ENTER". Upon hitting enter, without changing disk, there is some obscure code repeated twice and then a "Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 2:00 ide0: unexpected interrupt, status=0x80, count=1".
I tried downloading the compact root twice, rawrote it onto different disks and tried it on both computers with the same results. I have no new ideas of what to try next. What should I do? Derek
