Am Mon, 20 Feb 2006 09:41:53 +0100 schrieb jdd :

Thomas Porschberg wrote:

...

Hi,

I got opensuse-10.0 at DVD and want to upgrade my 9.0 SuSE with this release. Because my DVD-drive does not boot from DVD I created 7 bootdisks with mkbootdisk program from DVD.

But restarting the computer with the first boot disk gives me a boot menu with two warnings/errors:

Unknown keyword in syslinux.cfg Missing parameter in syslinux.cfg

and short time later:

Boot failed:

(I typed "linux <ENTER>")

Is this a known problem and how to overacome it ? The hardware I use is really not exceptional.

Thomas

don't know :-(

may be you'l find something here:

http://en.opensuse.org/Install_on_PC_that_can%27t_boot_from_CD

Hi, thanks for link. Work for this evening ! --

Thomas Porschberg wrote:

Am Mon, 20 Feb 2006 10:01:45 -0500 schrieb Carl Hartung :

...

On Monday 20 February 2006 03:21, Thomas Porschberg wrote: <snip>

Hi Thomas,

I offer these suggestions because I've "been there and done that":

1. use all new fresh-from-the-box floppies; no 'repurposed' recent purchases and certainly none that have been laying around gathering dust for a couple of years.

2. If you have a windows box available, use the GUI "rawwritewin" to create the diskettes. You are more likely to discover a 'marginal' image or floppy at this stage using this utility. In my opinion, error handling with floppies in Linux is not as mature or robust as it is in Win/DOS (it's legacy from the days when DOS *ran from* floppies.) If you rely on mkbootdisk alone, you will try to boot from the series of floppies you've made and 'discover' your marginal floppies then. This is a very time consuming and frustrating way to go.

3. As you are creating the floppies, take each one to another machine if at all possible and verify it can be read successfully. The first diskette will need to be verified in this manner with a Linux box. The others have a 'readme' file that is visible from Win/DOS. A clear sign of trouble is you do an 'ls' or 'dir' (DOS) and get a read error. I am amazed at how frequently I see this now... I *remember* the days when floppies *had* to be reliable. I guess they're not made to the same standards today. :-/

I tested my first bootdisk, created by mkbootdisk from DVD, at another computer, no success. Then I found http://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/10.0/bootdisks/ copied the first image to the floppy, started the computer with this disk again and a nice installation screen appeared... Now I hope the best for my seven 1.44MB disks, oh yes, very old ... and I feel about 8 years younger by copying files to disks.

Thomas

Hi Tomas, If you use old floppies it would be good idea to format them before use. It will refresh low level formating information that is used to sync data writing. I had same problem testing floppy installation, and formating helped out. Though I can't recall what was used BSD or windows, I recall that formatter included in SUSE failed. Maybe plain DOS format would help if you have some boot or rescue floppy around :-) -- Regards, Rajko.