floppy drive refuses creation Debian boot floppy

[verbum-qazKcTl6WRFWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org]

 Dear TLUG listserv:

I've just taken possession of a second-hand 1999-vintage HP Vectra desktop system. 
The machine is a Pentium 3 with a clock speed of nearly a gigahertz. There is about
a quarter gigabyte of onboard RAM. My vendor supplied the machine with a master
hard drive booting Microsoft Windows 2000 Pro and an empty slave drive. 

I successfully installed Debian GNU/Linux "Woody" 3.0r1 (stable branch) yesterday from 
2002-vintage "rescue" and "root" floppies and CDs, using my slave drive. GNU/Linux
calls the master drive hdc and calls the slave drive hdd. My boot arrangement so far
is merely booting from a floppy, created as a custom boot floppy toward the end
of the Debian install process. 

All worked well for several boots of the newly installed hdd GNU/Linux system
from my custom boot floppy. Then, inexplicably, the following events occurred: 

*a____Machine froze when not running X (I was running merely dpkg-configure
xserver-xfree86 
           and staring merely at an ncurses text-based window). I could not switch to an
alternative
           virtual console. I could not reboot with CTRL-ALT-DEL, and so had to power up
and down. 
*b____Machine gave a boot-failed message when I tried to boot from the custom boot floppy.

*c____Machine booted normally into Win2000 Pro from hdc and succeeded in formatting
          a floppy normally under Win2000 Pro. 
*d____Machine booted from Debian "rescue" and "root" floppies, as it would on starting
           a fresh Debian install. 
*e____Debian installer refused to create a new custom boot floopy. (I tried with several
          floppies. Each time, the installer said, cryptically, that the attempt to create
a boot
          floppy failed. It gave this cryptic message WITHOUT getting as far as the step
where
          it checks some hardware-specific parameters of the given floppy drive and
reports
          what it has found.) 
*f____Machine continued to refuse to read my old boot floppy. 

What should I do next in debugging? 


Anxiously, 


Tom = Tom Karmo
http://www.metascientia.com         				
  


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