7600/g3 floppy woes

[peter <peterrooney@shaw.ca>]

folk,

I am relatively new to linux.  I have no cd burner, so I tried the hard
drive install method. I tried a few times on scsi id 0, until i found
the FAQ note and switched to scsi id 4.  No luck despite repeated
attempts, and wow do i have questions.  it's interesting how HDSC setup,
pdisk, and the installer partitioner disagree on what partitions exist,
but those are questions for another day and only if my question here is
poorly worded.

I am now trying the floppy method.

about the floppy method, www.debian.org/distrib/floppyinst says you can either
    A) download just the files you need, or
    B) get the whole tree.
well, after finding the files required (outlined at
www.debian.org/releases/stable/powerpc/ch-appendix#s-file-descs), i
downloaded and...

    Disk Copy chokes on each of the .bin files.  If I use the menu item
"Mount Image...", I get an error of type 54.  If I drag and drop, I get
an error 183 ("The file "rescue.bin" was not recognized as a disk image file.").
    
    I even tried explicitly changing the type/creator code to DDim/ddsk
with no real luck:  Disk Copy instead coughs up a dialogue box claiming...
--------------------------------------------
  This disk is unreadable by this Computer.
  Do you want to initialize the disk?
   Name   [untitled_____________]
   Format [Mac OS Standard 1.4MB]
          <<Eject>>  <Initialize>
--------------------------------------------

Next i tried a mirror site (sunsite.ualberta.ca, if it matters) with the
same results.  This leaves me wondering, how am i to try debian at home?
 Am I having a brainfart, a parity error, or is there a important
instruction I have glossed over?

peter, a student on winter break

7600/120, OS 8.1, Disk Copy 6.3.3
G3sonnet @ 400, 120MB RAM, 4 SCSI drives, and _way_ too much free time.

-- 
HTML formatted email has a 99% chance of being vapourized by my filters,
never to appear on my screen.  Nothing personal.
Unsolicited commercial email might be retrieved and/or read and/or
translated and/or considered and/or printed and/or shredded and/or
deleted and/or stored and/or liberated at a charge of $500.00 CDN per
service per message.  Use of this email address indicates gleeful
consent to this possibility.
If this is unclear, consult Papa Legba before contacting me.
peterrooney@shaw.ca