Heather Stern wrote an enlightening reply to my post, which I am posting to this list with her permission. See the end of Heather's comment for my original problem description:
Since the boot problem happens to both the floppies and the CDs at the same point, obviously the kernel built into boot-floppies (thus used at the el-torito base of the CD as well) is allergic to some aspect of your hardware. That means you need some other install medium. If you can be on a network, you might try downloading the LNX-BBC ...er, you didn't say if you had a CD burner, but if you do this is a good time to use it... about a 50 MB image, and has other stuff on it, but its kernel is aimed to support all sorts of odd hardware, very compatible. Then you can get into one of its two debian installers available, as long as you have a net connection, because it just has the installer portion, not the files. You could try the Libranet distribution, if you need to keep a physical disc on hand, or have no burner. If you have another system to work with, a brief temporary hack to mount the debian cd under ~ftp/debian should allow you to use the disc you already have as the other end of your connection. Otherwise, rebuilding boot-floppies yourself is a real pain in the butt. Until you've got a bootfloppy set that will at least boot to the installer menu, you can't even take the "make 15 floppies" approach to get your minimum install. * Heather Stern * star@ many places... Here is an expanded version of Abrahao Riga's original post: My system is a Toshiba Satellite 1005-S157, with Windows XP. My plan is to make this a dual-boot box with Debian Linux. There is one bay into which you can put either the floppy drive or the DVD-ROM drive, but not both at once. I have tried to boot from three different Debian rescue floppies (one with 2.2 kernel, another with XFS kernel, another compiled without md support per recommendation in somebody's posting), and also a Debian bootable CD. Boot begins happily enough: the Debian welcome screen comes up, and Linux starts checking out the hardware. At a certain point, it hangs, either with a blinking cursor or not. The only thing to do then is to hit the power button. Is there something special I need to do with the rescue floppy to help it deal with this system? ----- Here is what's on the screen when it hangs (I'm hoping this gives a meaningful clue). What you see here is what I get when booting with the non-md 2.2 rescue floppy--the pattern is similar no matter whether I use the CD or one of the floppies: SMP motherboard not detected. Using dummy APIC emulation PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfd97a PCI: Probing PCI hardware Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2 Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039 IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP TCP: Hash tables configured (ehash 262144 bhash 65536) Starting kswapd v 1.5 Serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options enabled pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured Real Time Clock Driver v 1.09 RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 16384K size loop: registered device at major 7 PCI_IDE: unknown IDE controller on PCI bus 00 device F9, VID=0086, DID=248a PCI_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later ide 0: BM-DMA at 0x1860-0x1867, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio ide 1: BM-DMA at 0x1868-0x186f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio hda: TOSHIBA MK1517GAP, ATA DISK drive ide 0 at 0x1f0, 0x3f6 on irq 14 hda: TOSHIBA MK1517GAP, 14403MB w/0kB Cache, CHS=1836/255/63 Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M FDC 0 is a post-1991 _ (at this point you get a blinking cursor forever) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more http://games.yahoo.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
