I have an old Pentium 75 mhz laptop from MidWest Micro and I am trying to
load the latest stable version of Debian (V3.0r1).
There is no CD on the laptop, just a floppy and a PCMCIA Ethernet card
(newly installed), so I want to start with the floppies and then download
the rest over the net.
The boot process starts OK. At the boot prompt, I press enter and then when
I insert the 'root' floppy into the drive and press enter (upon request), it
gives the message:
RAMDISK: Compressed Image found at block 0
and that's it. The floppy continues to run for about 10 seconds and then is
silent. I can scroll up to see the previous messages with shift+Page up,
but no text can be entered on the screen. According to the manual the
dbootstrap program should be automatically launched at this point, but
nothing happens.
I have tried to recreate the root disk on two other new disks with the same
results. Using the boot argument, "ramdisk0" produces the same result, while
using the boot argument "floppy0" produces the following output:
RAMDISK: Compressed Image found at block 0
apm: BIOS version 1.1 Flags 0x03(Driver version 1.13)
apm: disabled upon user request
VFS: Mounted root(ext2 filesystem) read only.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 152K freed
VM: killing process modprobe
kmod: failed exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k net -pf -1, errno 12
init started: BusyBox V0.60.3-pre(2002.01.21-22:50+0000) multi call binary
VM: killing init
VM: killing init
After this, I also tried creating the rescue and root discs for the
'compact' flavor of the same release. The results are the same when simply
pressing enter at the boot prompt, however, when I try floppy0 there is
quite a lot of error messages, most of them with the form:
VM: killing process init
VM: Killing process udbootstrap
Bummer couldn't start dbootstrap. Bad address
and others like this. After 20 minutes, these messages are still being
generated at a steady state.
I don't think that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the pc and I
was also able to install the base packages from an earlier release using
only floppies some time ago(Potato I think). I haven't used the computer in
years and don't have these old installation disks any more, so trying them
is not really an option.
Any ideas why I can't get dbootstrap to run? Let me know if more info is
needed.