floppy drive refuses creation Debian boot floppy

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 01:02:53PM +0000, verbum-qazKcTl6WRFWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org wrote:
>  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? 

Well a few things to consider:

The floppy drive might be old and defective.

The HD really ought to be hda, so perhaps someone should place the IDE
cables correctly inside the machine.  Apparently someone did it
backwards.

Run a memory check (memtest86 is OK).

Check the floppies used (superformat --superverify works for me).

Lennart Sorensen
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