trouble installing debian

[Chris Acheson <chrisa@mail.eriecoast.com>]

I'm having trouble installing debian on my system.  It's an IBM PS/1,
486sx33 w/ 8mb ram, and a 1.2gb quantum fireball hard drive, with 5
partitions.  I put the rescue disk in my floppy drive, reboot, and press
enter at the "boot:" prompt.  There is some disk activity for a few
seconds, and then the system freezes (the floppy drive light stays on, but
there is no activity).  I've tried several things to fix this problem, such
as using different disks with the resc1440.bin disk image, all of them
surface scanned before rawriting, using the resc1440-safe, resc1440-tecra,
resc1440-safe-tecra disk images, and booting by typing linux
floppy=thinkpad.  Is there any other way that I can get linux to boot from
my floppy drive?  If not, would installing off of my HD's 5th partition,
reformatting partitions 1-4, and then reformatting partition 5 once linux
is up and running cause problems?  DOS and OnTrack are on the 1st
partition, and win95 is on the 2nd.


								Chris Acheson