Re: woody install on laptop

[Shyamal Prasad <shyamal.prasad@ericsson.com>]

    milti> for the past couple of days, ive been trying to do a
    milti> floppy/network install of woody on my sony picturebook (usb
    milti> floppy/xircom netcard) and have not been able to get past
    milti> the rescue disk: the error that stands out is

    milti>    root fs not mounted

The (Sony) USB floppy cannot be used with any of the Woody boot
images. Your BIOS boots from the floppy, but after that you are stuck
because it is only visible as a USB device. The bf2.4 image includes
the USB support as modules, but you need the USB floppy to get them
loaded into the kernel ;-) You are kind of stuck.

There are several patched boot/root disks that do include the USB
drivers you need in the kernel on the boot disk. 

For example you could try
http://www-user.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~blochedu/usb-install/

Or follow the advice on
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~dhofer/sony_vaio_pcg-z505ls.html

I have the good fortune of having a Sony PCMCIA CD drive to go with my
N505VE so I have never tried the floppy method. I'm confident one of
these will work for you and you will not have to go out and build your
own boot kernel and disk.

BTW my Sony CD drive works as standard IDE drive in recovery mode if I
pass "ide1=0x180,0x386" when booting. I'm not sure this information is
going to help you, but it might.....

And, oh yes, please do us the favor of not cross posting on Debian
lists! 

Cheers!
Shyamal