Debian Kills Disks
Hello Debian Geeks:
Before you get upset let me declare that I'm a Linux/Debian newbie geek
wannabe. I've only recently (a month ago) became interested in Linux.
I've spent most of the time reading everything I could find. I have
d/led a few distros to get a feel of Linux. I have two computers, a
486DX50 VLB and a 386DX40. The 486 is running PC DOS 7.0 and Win95, 40x
CD and SB 16 Pro that is my main box for doing almost everything
including surfing the net. The 386 is my test box that I'm trying to get
Linux to run on but it doesn't have a CD or modem. Consequently, I have
obtained everything I have for Linux on the Win95 box and transferred to
the 386 via floppy.
I've made the floppies (Rescue, Drivers, 5 base disks for Debian)
following the instructions in the .txt files and Howto's on the 486 in
DOS using Rawrite for them and used the disks to install Debian several
times as I would learn more and realize I had left something out or
wanted to try something different. These seem to be the most stable
floppies I have made in Debian. Needless to say, Debian would succeed
more times than any of the other distros, including RedHat.
Obviously, I spent most of my time working/learning Debian. However,
after using a floppy two or three times, it became unusable in any OS.
This I attributed to normal attrition, even though the attrition rate
was a lot higher than in any of the other OS's. Now the hard drive in
the 386 has become unusable.
Even Debian is refusing to install properly on it, the last semi
successful install attempt resulted in a Read Only partial install that
won't boot from the hard disk and a floppy boot won't access the hard
disk. I believe that Debian has "signed" the boot partition in some way
to make the disk(s) unusable. In other words, a software flag or
partition id was written to the disk in a way that was not completely
correct. How can I correct this? Is there a Hex editor I could use to
clear the boot sector of the disk so a new install would work correctly?
Thanks.
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