Hello,
I am working on installing Debian 2.2r6 on a Packard Bell Intel machine, which
has a Pheonix BIOS, 23.0MB RAM, a 428MB Hard Drive, a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive,
and a Matsushita CD-ROM drive (as well as a keyboard, mouse, monitor, two COM
ports, two telephone ports, etc). I'm completely new to Debian, and have very
little experience with PCs (I'm usually a Mac person), so I'm not sure what I
need to include; I'll just try to give as much information as I can.
I am installing from a rescue floppy created from the rescue.bin file on the
official binary Debian 2.2r6 CDs (which I purchased from TuxCDs), which uses
linux 2.2.19. Installation seems to go all in order until I reach the point at
which it asks to either make Linux bootable directly from the hard drive or
creat a boot floppy, at which point neither works.
When configuring device driver support, I install sbpcd for my matsushita
CD-ROM drive, and have tried also installing de-floppy, linear, raid0, raid1,
raid5 in hopes of helping the floppy drive, but with no change in results. I
then install the base system from the first Debian CD (extracted from
/instmnt/dists/potato/main/disks-i386/current/base2_2.tgz). The drive was
giving me problems before (rawrite2.exe gave me "general failure reading drive
D" several times, but would go on after retrying), when I was trying to make
the rescue and device driver floppies, but doesn't seem to cause any problems
here. The Debian CD seems to be fine, however; on another computer,
rawrite2.exe had no problems.
When I try to make Linux bootable directly from the HD, either option (the MBR
on /dev/hda, the only hard drive, or on /dev/hda1, my boot partition) fails,
saying that "LILO wasn't able to install ... the most common reason why LILO
fails is trying to boot a kernel that resides at a location on the disk higher
than the 1023rd cylinder" ... etc. My partition scheme, however, has both the
boot and the root partitions well under the 1023rd cylinder; I don't think I
even have 1024 cylinders. (The partitions are /hda1, which is 10MB at the
beginning of the disk, a Primary linux ex2 partition marked bootable and
mounted as boot, /hda2, a 30MB Primary linux ext2 partition which is root, and
a 388MB Linux Swap partition, also Primary.)
When I try to make a boot floppy, it asks for a blank floppy, says "creating a
filesystem on the floppy...", and then (after the floppy drive makes a short
noise) says "Creation of the boot floppy failed. Please make sure that the
floppy was not write-proteced, and that you put it in the first floppy drive.
Try another floppy if the problem persists." I have tried with several
floppies, none of which have been write protected, and all of which have gone
into the first (and only) floppy drive. I've tried both freshly formatted for
PC, as well as old Mac-formatted disks. When I check Ctrl-Alt-F3, I see:
Jun 15 21:07:48 (none) user.err dbootstrap[137]: Please place a blank floppy
disk in the first floppy disk drive, and press ENTER.
Jun 15 21:07:48 (none) user.debug dbootstrap[137]: umount: No such file or
directory
Jun 15 21:07:48 (none) user.info dbootstrap[137]: umount: Invalid arguement
Jun 15 21:07:48 (none) user.info dbootstrap[137]: write_boot_floppy: found
floppy of size 1440
Jun 15 21:07:49 (none) user.info dbootstrap[137]: formatting floppy with cmd
'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/target/lib:/target/usr/lib";
/target/usr/bin/superformat /dev/fd0 hd'
Jun 15 21:07:49 (none) user.err dbootstrap[137]: Creation of the boot floppy
failed. Please make sure that the floppy was not write-protected, and that you
put it in the first drive. Try another floppy if the problem persists.
Ctrl-Alt-F4 gives me general starting-up stuff, ending in:
VFS: Insert root floppy disk to be loaded into RAM disk and press ENTER
VFS: Disk change detected on device fd(2,0)
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
apm: BIOS not found
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 156k freed
kmod: runaway modprobe loop assumed and stopped
kmod: runaway modprobe loop assumed and stopped
Ctrl-Alt-F2 is an unactivated console, and Ctrl-Alt-F1 is dbootstrap.
Hopefully I've not been too exhaustive. Many thanks,
-Mark
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