Thomas Porschberg wrote:
Am Mon, 20 Feb 2006 10:01:45 -0500
schrieb Carl Hartung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
On Monday 20 February 2006 03:21, Thomas Porschberg wrote:
<snip>
Hi Thomas,
I offer these suggestions because I've "been there and done that":
1. use all new fresh-from-the-box floppies; no 'repurposed' recent
purchases and certainly none that have been laying around gathering
dust for a couple of years.
2. If you have a windows box available, use the GUI "rawwritewin" to
create the diskettes. You are more likely to discover a 'marginal'
image or floppy at this stage using this utility. In my opinion,
error handling with floppies in Linux is not as mature or robust as
it is in Win/DOS (it's legacy from the days when DOS *ran from*
floppies.) If you rely on mkbootdisk alone, you will try to boot from
the series of floppies you've made and 'discover' your marginal
floppies then. This is a very time consuming and frustrating way to
go.
3. As you are creating the floppies, take each one to another machine
if at all possible and verify it can be read successfully. The first
diskette will need to be verified in this manner with a Linux box.
The others have a 'readme' file that is visible from Win/DOS. A clear
sign of trouble is you do an 'ls' or 'dir' (DOS) and get a read
error. I am amazed at how frequently I see this now... I *remember*
the days when floppies *had* to be reliable. I guess they're not made
to the same standards today. :-/
I tested my first bootdisk, created by mkbootdisk from DVD, at another
computer, no success.
Then I found http://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/10.0/bootdisks/ copied
the first image to the floppy, started the computer with this disk
again and a nice installation screen appeared...
Now I hope the best for my seven 1.44MB disks, oh yes, very old ...
and I feel about 8 years younger by copying files to disks.
Thomas
Hi Tomas,
If you use old floppies it would be good idea to format them before use.
It will refresh low level formating information that is used to sync
data writing.
I had same problem testing floppy installation, and formating helped
out. Though I can't recall what was used BSD or windows, I recall that
formatter included in SUSE failed. Maybe plain DOS format would help if
you have some boot or rescue floppy around :-)
--
Regards,
Rajko.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
