Floppy installer fails to load modules

[Jack Carroll <dischord@myrealbox.com>]

	Didn't find anything about this in the archives.
	I want to install Woody or Sarge on two older machines that have
SCSI CD-ROMs and SCSI hard disks.  Neither can boot from a CD.  I've always
booted installation programs from floppies in the past.
	I downloaded the boot floppy set and wrote them out according to the
instructions in "Installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 for Intel x86".  I've read
the manual pretty thoroughly.  I checked each floppy against the downloaded
image with cmp.  None had errors.
	After the rescue and root floppies read in, I got a message saying
that no hard disks were recognized.  (The same thing occurs with my
Ethernet boards; they need to have modules loaded before they can be
recognized.)
	Then I select "Load modules from floppies".  That fails with a
message saying that it was unable to mount the driver floppy.  If I try to
mount any of them on a machine that has Linux running, it asks me to specify
the filesystem type.  All reasonable guesses fail -- it ain't msdos, ext2,
or ext3.

	This sounds like a problem with the installation instructions.  Has
anybody successfully done an install from floppies on a system that needs
modules to be loaded?  Do I need to build a custom kernel and install that
on a rescue floppy?