On 02/25/2011 06:49 PM, Stephen Powell wrote: [snip]
I have found the culprit: it was a bad floppy disk! The media was physically defective and was causing I/O errors. Once I put a good floppy in it, everything worked fine. How embarrassing! Thanks to all who replied, and sorry for the noise.
My wife's old computer (a tower sitting on the floor in a cabinet) once wouldn't boot, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. So I bought her a new PC.
A year later, I looked at the old PC at just the correct angle and saw a disk in the floppy drive...
*That* was embarrassing! -- "The normal condition of mankind is tyranny and misery." Milton Friedman