bootdisk problem

[nthomas@cise.ufl.edu (N. Thomas)]

Trying to install Debian 2.1 on a friend's Dell Optiflex 486-66.

I was booting off the bootdisk and when the initial message and the boot:
prompt comes up, I hit enter, and it loads the root.bin, prints 4 periods,
and then hangs, like this:

   loading root.bin....

I tried all the boot images, resc-1440, resc-1440-safe, resc-1440-tecra,
resc-1440-safetecra, and they all have this problem.

To be sure it wasn't the hardware, I tried booting off a RedHat 6 bootdisk,
and that worked fine.

If it is a hardware conflict, what switches could I pass to the boot disk to
fix this?

Anybody know what could be wrong?

thanks,
noble

-- 
N. Thomas
nthomas@cise.ufl.edu