On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 09:23:29PM -0700, Martin Willcocks wrote: > Hi Greg and Douglas:
Martin, don't cc me; I subscribe to the list. > floppy drives that is somehow corrected once Windows 98 has fully > booted, but which still affects booting from a floppy disk. I did try You can probably find someone with a spare floppy drive; most people don't use them anymore. Seriously, try your town dump/transfer station or wherever people take old computers. > What is or was Debian woody? Debian 3.0. I still have CDs for it, it can run on all my old boxes. Debian didn't do as many things automagically (no udev, no devfs, a simpler installer, etc); I really liked it. The problem now will be that it doesn't get security support anymore. However, if the box isn't used directly on the internet (i.e. separated either physically [no connection at all] or by a well set up firewall, then you'll be somewhat safer. However, a firewall doesn't protect you from e.g. exploits in a web browser. > Doug, it's tin whiskers, by the way, and I don't think that's the > problem, as they are worse when there is no lead in the solder (probably > not true of 1988 vintage computers!) Whiskers, thats it. I know about the tin whisker thing. There are also zinc whiskers from galvanized metal. Of course the biggest source of the zinc whisker problem was in data centers with raised floors (the support structure and the underside of the floor tiles were zinc coated). I'd still unplug and reseat everything except perhaps the CPU (don't want to mess up the heat-sink goop). > There doesn't appear to be any way > to enter a non-GUI mode with the Corel distribution when booting from > the CD, and since it does not fully load, I can't run any diagnostics > from it either. My friend is also an OpenBSD and GNU guru, so I can ask > him about the options you mentioned. The debian woody media and manuals will be in the debian archives. I made up a boot-floppy tool set (since my old boxes don't boot CDROM) that uses 3 floppies. I can email you the image files (make the floppies with dd) if you like, each is 1.44 MB and I suppose I could tarball it up. The first floppy is the standard woody installer floppy (kernel only). It prompts for the root floppy. The second floppy is a root floppy. This brings you to a normal prompt with a basic filesystem. The third floppy is a set of files. You mount the floppy, and run the install script that copies everything over to /usr/local/. The whole thing ends up sitting on a ramfs so that you then unmount the floppy and have access to the drive for other stuff. IIRC it has busybox with all the links which provides all the usual tools including nano-tiny. There's e2fsck, fdisk, wipe, dd. No networking though. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
