low memory installation 4mb 386sx

[Rick Dawson]

Hello everyone: This is my first posting to this newsgroup. I have the following system: 386SX-25 math copro 4mb ram 1.44 fdd 120 mb hdd 4x atapi ide cdrom   know ram is cheap but I want to do this because I understand it can be done and I want to take on the challenge.  (Kind of like the famous question: why do men climb mountains? Because they're there.)  I realize that there are mini-distros that would install easily on dos via umsdos but that's not what I'm trying to accomplish.  I would like to install a full distro on a ext2 file system without any dos partitions left over.  When I'm done I just want to have two partitions - one native linux partition and one linux swap partition.   I have Debian 2.1 (2_1_11.1-1) on cd.  I read the low memory installation instructions and I tried using lowmem.bin as the initial installation floppy.  It starts okay by autodetecting the hardware and then the system returns the following error message and freezes:   kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-22, errno=2 kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-22, errno=2 kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno=2 kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno=2 kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno=2 kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-8, errno=2   At this point I'm assuming that the problem has something to do with the low memory constraint.   I'm a newbie so please be patient with me and any dumb questions.  Thank you in advance. Rick Dawson