Rescue disk woe; floppy is OK !?
> I'm trying to install debian's stable linux distribution from floppies on
> an old 486 machine. But it always stalls at the installation of the
> kernel. I'm prompted to insert the Rescue disk, but the system doesn't
> recognize it. I've tried many different disks from different machines,
> but they all hang the same way at the same point. I can boot from all of
> them fine to start
> the installation, but they _all_ hang at the kernel installation step.
>
> I create the rescue disk using rawrite2.exe with this command:
> rawrite2 -f resc1440.bin -d a:
>
> This is the 'Rescue Disk', right? From DOS I can list the files created,
> among them:
>
> ldlinux.sys
> linux
> root.bin
> debian.txt
> syslinux.cfg
> rdev.sh
> install.sh
>
> Am I doing something wrong here? Is this not the Rescue Disk? If I'm
> doing this right, any ideas about why I always hang at the same point?
>
> Here are some questions for down the road, assuming I can get past this
> problem:
>
> My DOS partition is still my boot. How do I switch to Linux from DOS? Do
> I always have to boot in with the rescue disk?
>
> Any suggestions on installing the packages when the only way I can get
> files onto this thing is on floppies? I'll ftp them onto another machine
> (WinNT); then do I rawrite2.exe each one onto floppies? Or can I just
> WinZIP them across several ones, or gz/tar under NT, or what? I'm not
> sure how I'll proceed here, so I have all these pre-newbie questions. My
> goal is just to use the machine for lyx, so I guess I'll need Xwindow and
> lyx, and not much more.
>
Is there a resource similar to the install.txt for what to do once Linux is
up and running, that might answer these types of questions?
> Thanks for any help,
> Rob Brendel
Reply to: