Thanks for the suggestions so far; running the install without floppy=thinkpad does get me further into the install, but then I get more strange stuff. The system prints out a set of instructions for continuing the low-memory install, then follows that with a list of fdisk choices. At this point it only lists choices 1, "Run the disk partitioning system in order to make a swap partition," and 4, "Reboot".
So far so good. But right after it prints those fdisk choices, it spits out a list of errors, which follows: floppy0: unexpected interrupt floppy0: sensei repl[0]=c0 repl[1]=0 floppy0: sensei repl[0]=c1 repl[1]=0 floppy0: sensei repl[0]=c2 repl[1]=0 floppy0: sensei repl[0]=c3 repl[1]=0 floppy0: sensei repl[0]=80 attempt to access beyond end of device 02:00: rw=1, want=26, limit=2 attempt to access beyond end of device 02:00: rw=1, want=27, limit=2 I've gotten to this point before, just by trying different boot options. After this, I can still access the menu choice #1 to attempt to create a swap partition, but here's what happens: When I enter choice 1, a list of stuff flies by too fast to catch, followed by the prompt to choose a hard drive device name and the list of all available names. [aside: you would think that fdisk would be smart enough to check and see that I only have one IDE drive and not a list of SCSI devices as long as my arm, but I guess not all installs can be that smart.] After I enter the choice /dev/hda and press enter, I get a repeat of the instructions followed by the fdisk menu again, this time with choice 2: "initialize the swap partition" added. If I press 2 and enter, I get the following set of messages: Please wait while swap partitions are detected. . . fdisk: not found attempt to access beyond end of device 02:00: rw=0, want=27, limit=2 Major problem: unable to read inode from device 02:00 sbin/swapsetup: cannot create /tmp/13: directory nonexistent The process then stops. If I switch to the terminal on f3, there's something being repeated too fast to catch. On f4, there are several repeats of the "attempt to access/02:00" pair of lines above, with the want= number varying from 19 to 27, and at the beginnning of each line either a <4> or a <6>. Like I said last time, I think I can eliminate media trouble, and the floppy=thinkpad boot option causes even more problems, but I do think that what I'm seeing is some sort of problem with reading the floppy. Somebody said I should send along the model number of the thinkpad; it's 2603-17N. The processor is a 486SLC running at 50MHz. Somebody else said that I should try the boot disk labeled for the Toshiba Tecra. I haven't tried that (my gut tells me it won't help) but I will while I wait to see if anybody has any more ideas. Please, help me save another machine from the clutches of DOS. Getting it to do what I want wouldn't be such a bad thing either. Thanks, -michael Michael Jinks wrote: > > I'm new to this list and new to Debian -- I've been using RedHat for > about the past two months though. Before that I was very nearly > Unix-free. > > A brief comb through the archives didn't turn up anything that looked > like it pertained to my problem; if you know better, just let me know > and maybe point me in the right direction. > > I'm doing my first-ever Debian install, and the target machine is an IBM > thinkpad 486 with 4M RAM. The rescue floppy works fine, up to the point > where it asks me to insert the root floppy, at which point I've gotten > several different sorts of errors. > > The one I've gotten the most times is: > > end_request: I/O error, dev 02:00, sector 0 > VFS: Cannot open root device 02:00 > Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 02:00 > > This looks to me like a media error, but I've tried two different copies > of the root filesystem floppy and gotten the same error on both, so now > I'm thinking it might be an install program goof, or maybe Linux just > doesn't like my hardware? > > I did once get as far as trying to run fdisk, but it didn't behave even > remotely like I expect fdisk to behave, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't a > real run. > > The boot line I'm using is: > > boot: floppy0 floppy=thinkpad > > First off, is this syntax even right? > > Any and all thoughts appreciated. . . > > -michael > > -- > TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] . > Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
