Toshiba laptop and boot floppy problems
Heather Stern wrote an enlightening reply to my post,
which I am posting to this list with her permission.
See the end of Heather's comment for my original
problem description:
Since the boot problem happens to both the floppies
and the CDs at the same point, obviously the kernel
built into boot-floppies (thus used at the el-torito
base of the CD as well) is allergic to some aspect of
your hardware.
That means you need some other install medium.
If you can be on a network, you might try downloading
the LNX-BBC ...er, you didn't say if you had a CD
burner, but if you do this is a good time to use it...
about a 50 MB image, and has other stuff on it, but
its kernel is aimed to support all sorts of odd
hardware, very compatible. Then you can get into one
of its two debian installers available, as long as you
have a net connection, because it just has the
installer portion, not the files.
You could try the Libranet distribution, if you need
to keep a physical disc on hand, or have no burner.
If you have another system to work with, a brief
temporary hack to mount the debian cd under
~ftp/debian should allow you to use the disc you
already have as the other end of your connection.
Otherwise, rebuilding boot-floppies yourself is a real
pain in the butt.
Until you've got a bootfloppy set that will at least
boot to the installer menu, you can't even take the
"make 15 floppies" approach to get your minimum
install.
* Heather Stern * star@ many places...
Here is an expanded version of Abrahao Riga's original
post:
My system is a Toshiba Satellite 1005-S157, with
Windows XP.
My plan is to make this a dual-boot box with Debian
Linux.
There is one bay into which you can put either the
floppy drive or the DVD-ROM drive, but not both at
once.
I have tried to boot from three different Debian
rescue floppies (one with 2.2 kernel, another with XFS
kernel, another compiled without md support per
recommendation in somebody's posting), and also a
Debian bootable CD.
Boot begins happily enough: the Debian welcome screen
comes up, and Linux starts checking out the hardware.
At a certain point, it hangs, either with a blinking
cursor or not. The only thing to do then is to hit the
power button.
Is there something special I need to do with the
rescue floppy to help it deal with this system?
----- Here is what's on the screen when it hangs
(I'm hoping this gives a meaningful clue).
What you see here is what I get when booting with the
non-md 2.2 rescue floppy--the pattern is similar no
matter whether I use the CD or one of the floppies:
SMP motherboard not detected. Using dummy APIC
emulation
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfd97a
PCI: Probing PCI hardware
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society
NET3.039
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP
TCP: Hash tables configured (ehash 262144 bhash
65536)
Starting kswapd v 1.5
Serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options
enabled pty: 256 Unix98 ptys configured
Real Time Clock Driver v 1.09
RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 16384K
size
loop: registered device at major 7
PCI_IDE: unknown IDE controller on PCI bus 00 device
F9, VID=0086, DID=248a
PCI_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide 0: BM-DMA at 0x1860-0x1867, BIOS settings:
hda:DMA, hdb:pio
ide 1: BM-DMA at 0x1868-0x186f, BIOS settings:
hdc:pio, hdd:pio
hda: TOSHIBA MK1517GAP, ATA DISK drive
ide 0 at 0x1f0, 0x3f6 on irq 14
hda: TOSHIBA MK1517GAP, 14403MB w/0kB Cache,
CHS=1836/255/63
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M FDC 0 is a post-1991
_ (at this point you get a blinking cursor forever)
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