I haven't been keeping up on this list recently, but a quick archive scan suggests this hasn't come up recently.
My laptop (toshiba tecra 8000) won't boot from any debian 3.0 CDs _or_ the normal debian floppy boot image, which makes it very hard to boot from when you have a disaster (I just had a small one, prompting this message). To get installed I had to use the 'sbm.bin' (Smart boot manager) floppy image, which does work in the floppy drive and allows booting from the CD. I don't know why the floppy image doesn't work (the error complains of 'invalid compressed format (err=2)' when trying to uncompress the kernel), and it's not really relevant here, but the CD doesn't work because the BIOS only understand 1.4MB images, not 2.8 MB images. All this is fair enough - it's a middle vintage laptop and some of them give trouble with CD booting (so does one of my desktop machines for similar reasons). However I recently found that a knoppix CD boots just fine and was wondering whether this discovery meant we could do something to improve the number of machines our CDs work on by doing whatever it is knoppix does on at least one of the CDs? Judging from the message that flashes by knoppix uses syslinux v1.76 Non-bootable CDs is a real turn-off these days to a new user so this is important for them, and it's very helpful to people like me too. Is there any mileage in this idea - I admit I haven't been following x86 CD boot stuff in any detail, beyond appreciating that we use a fancy syslinux multiboot thing on CD1, and something else ('the old scheme') on the other CDs. It seems that syslinux can be made to boot on 1.4mb only BIOSes, but the config we use on debian CD1 doesn't. I'm happy to do any testing of proposed changes if anyone who understands this stuff gets enthused. Discuss. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]