Klaus Imgrund wrote: > -SNIP- <
There is obviously some problem with either my reiser partitions although they work fine or with the cd's. The 'testing' cd's boot but don't recognise my NIC. Funny thing is that a old potato cd boots just fine w/o complaining about superblocks. Klaus
That is really weird! With either the boot floppies or the installer from the CD, you should be able to boot right up into the start of the install process... i.e. where it starts asking about your keyboard, etc. It doesn't even try to access the HD until you get to the partitioning step in the first phase before the reboot. Both the "rescue" and "root" floppies are run out of RAM. It should make no difference how the HD is partitioned or what pre-existing FS is installed. When you get to the partitioning step, you can accept the existing partitions and create the new FS on them or wipe them out and start from scratch... like on a blank HD.
How far along are you getting in the boot process with either the CDs or Boot Floppies before it panics? If you get to the partitioning step, try removing the existing partitions (with cfdisk or fdisk) and creating new ones. I seem to recall some changes in Reiserfs about the time Woody came out. If you are using partitions and a FS setup with an older version of Reiserfs, it might be causing you some problems. Reiser wasn't an "official" part of Debian until Woody came out. Dunno what else to suggest.
Good Luck! Cheers, -Don Spoon-