"G. Kapetanios" wrote: >I would really appreciate any help. >For people in and around London if this doesn't work out I am willing to >pay to >restore my machine > Are you in London or in Cambridge? Surely there's someone in Cambridge who can help? If I needed to, I could get to London in 2 hours; Cambridge would take longer.
>I have manage to salvage a minimal system after accidentally deleting my >root partitioon. I tried to install debian stable but it did not work. >I did floppy disk installation butfloppy relaiobility does not seem to be >the problem. Let me explain why I have the debian disks on an unharmed >partiotin which I can access. However the file base2.0_... produces an >errror This is one area where the installation process falls down: if there are any errors they are all too likely to get overwritten by the next bit of fancy screen stuff; there should be an option for a pure dumb screen install, so that anything that appears on the screen is left there until it scrolls off the top. >on my system it goes away too fast to read it. Obviously the same error >appear with floppies even when I re-downloaded the floppies from the net. >I am using july 21 1998 floppies is there a problem with thith those ? > >Anyway I installed a debian 1.0 ( yes !!) from some old floppies >The installation went ok. I have the distribution in a >another partiton and I tried to use dselect but the Package file had a >problem and dpkg does not work. I can solve the problem only if I could >run program from my /usr partiton which I can access >This is the second problem I can see the binary >I can cat the binary but I can't run it ># /usr/bin/less >/usr/bin/less: No such file or dicrectory This is not what you get for a missing file: $ /usr/bin/junk bash: /usr/bin/junk: No such file or directory I wonder if it is looking for a shared library that you haven't loaded? That isn't the message I see for a missing shared library, but things may have been different for that version. If you were running version 2.0 before you lost your root partition, all your standard commands will be compiled against libc6. Now you have installed 1.1, you don't have libc6, so the newer commands cannot run. This is a double bind: you cannot run dpkg (libc6) until you have installed libc6, but you cannot install libc6 without dpkg. It sounds as if you have got to reinstall with 2.0 or later. I cannot make out from your message whether your problem with 2.0 is during the installation process. Can you boot from a CD? or put your hard disk into a machine that can? If you cannot install 2.0 at all, you will need to get hold of the shared libraries that are needed by all the programs you want to run. For dpkg, these are: $ ldd /usr/bin/dpkg libdpkg.so.0 => /usr/lib/libdpkg.so.0 (0x4000c000) libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40027000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000) You will need someone else with a working 2.0 system to copy these from, or else extract them from the appropriate .deb files onto some working machine (remember that a .deb file is an ar archive that contains a tar archive of the software.) -- Oliver Elphick [EMAIL PROTECTED] Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver PGP key from public servers; key ID 32B8FAA1 ======================================== "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man; But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed." James 1:13,14