Well, I took everybody's advice, and went out and bought a new floppy drive
and a box of new disks. I've now made 16 floppy images of root.bin, using
several D/L's of the file, from multiple sources, using both dd in linux and
rawrite2 in DOS. EVery one give the same error"
crc error<5>VFS Please insert root floppy and press ENTER:
If I insert a new disk and press enter, I get a spew of MS-DOS related
floppy messages, which I can't even begin to figure out, and then a kernel
panic, "unable to mount root filesystem". If I boot from the Debian CD, I
get the kernel booted and the root filesystem mounted, but then I get
"unable to open initial console" and "no init found, try passing init= to
kernel". This happens with or without the load_ramdisk=1 option. After 16
brand-new disks, I don't know what to think. Should I give up and run NT on
this damned thing? <shudder>. I actually had a disk that I could boot,
once. Of course, my CDROM was bad, so I couldn't install. Is there no end
in sight?