floppy drive refuses creation Debian boot floppy

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

Dear Lennart, 

Thanks very much for your thoughts on the Great Floppy Mystery. 

Happily enough, I'm able to boot my Debian box not from the CUSTOM boot floppy, 
but from a generic RESCUE floppy (in rescue mode, rather than
install mode, and with an argument "root=/dev/hdd1" telling
the boot process where to find the root partition). 

I've made a couple of handwritten notes from your useful mail. 


Rapidly, cheerfully,

Tom 
http://www.metascientia.com    

       				> 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
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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--
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