Re: Installing slink from a Zip drive

[Santiago Vila Doncel <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Thu, 15 Apr 1999, David Wright wrote:

> One of the nice things about installing hamm was that I could do it with
> one floppy and a zip drive. So I was really looking forward to putting
> slink on a couple of new boxes which are, as far as possible, MS-free.
> 
> So I partitioned a disk, got to "Install Operating System Kernel and
> Modules", popped over to VC2 and tried to mount my zip drive.
> "sdb4 not a block device". Looked at VC4: only 1 scsi host (my
> empty hard drive).
> 
> After saying how easy it was, here I am with a very red face.
> Do I have to go back to pumping floppies (9 now!) to install slink.
> This is a big step backwards.

The problem is that the ppa driver required to make the ZIP drive to work
is now out of the kernel (i.e. as a module).

[ This is a difference between Debian 2.0 and Debian 2.1 that I discovered
  last week, when I was also trying to install it from scratch on a
  CD-ROM-less machine ].

So you'll need two floppies: the rescue and the drivers floppy.

Fortunately you may use the ZIP drive as the source for the base system.
(i.e. the base2_1.tgz file). Just remember to load the ppa module
when the rescue floppy allows you to do it.

Thanks.