Re: Slow linux.bin

[cr <cr@orcon.net.nz>]

On Mon, 03 Nov 2003 04:16, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 08:48, - _ r a r o h _ - wrote:
> > Hallo,
> >
> > installed woody with booting from floppy - it takes 4 minutes to read
> > the floppy. I hear the movement of the floppy some 20 seconds ...
> >
> > Any idea how to fix ?
>
> 4 minutes to read a 1.44MB floppy?  That was dog slow even in 1990.
>
> Have you looked in /var/log/syslog?  Did you hear the FDD clicking
> and whining like it there's a bad sector on the disk?

I've had some experience of floppy-booting Linuxes (usually until I get Grub 
sorted)   and I found that, on a K6-2  350,  Red Hat was tolerable (don't 
know how many seconds exactly, but not much slower than DOS).   OTOH, 
floppy-booting Debian Woody was incredibly slow - six or seven *minutes*!
But no signs of any disk read failures - just very slow overall. 

However, on my new box  (Athlon 2000)  Woody floppy-boots in maybe 15 
seconds.      

I don't really believe the speed of floppy-booting is dependent on the CPU  
:)      - more likely, it was some sort of incompatible drive setting (though 
what, I have no idea).

cr