oops

[HAL 9000 <DSCHMIDT@SOUTHWIND.NET>]

   Two friends and I spent four hours last Saturday installing the Debian
packackage.  (A beautiful spring day in Wichita Kansas.)  When we couldn't get
the installer to recognise my CD-ROM drive probably because it is plugged into
my sound blaster card instead of the I/O port as the software probably
expects.  We plugged in my friends IDE CD reader and installed successfully. 
Except for a few modules which gave errors from the CD reader.

   The next day I was playing with a operational Linux system which would boot
from the hard drive.  Since I'm a complete novice at Linux I didn't know even
how to view a directory.  I had seen the install done so I thought I'd
re-install and this time write down the error messages and try and decide if
they were serious.

O O P S ! ! !

When I got into the "Install operating system kernel and modules" step I
didn't know how to tell it to use the CD reader to input the drivers.  I
couldn't figure out how to back out of that procedure.  So, I re booted.

O O P S ! !

Now my hard drive boot sector is so trashed that if I try to boot from it the
system locks up so tight that it requires power off to get it started again. 
So, I ran the "Make Linux bootable directly from hard drive."

O O P S !

LILO wasn't able to install.  But I can run Linux if I make a boot floppy.

O O P S

The "Make a bootable floppy" procedure trashes the header on the floppy disk
so bad that it has to be re-formatted.