Art, Thanks for the info. The way youi describe (copying the CD to the Hard disk) was the way I installed 7.3, the problem with 8.0 is you need to use two floppy disks before it asks you the install source :(. Al. On Sunday 21 April 2002 00:21, Art Fore wrote:

I just had the same type problem with a Sony Vaio where the harddisk had been wiped clean and had to install Win98 for my Sister. I ended up taking the harddisk out, put it in a Pyro 2.5 inch drive kit and copying the Win98 CDROM with my desktop computer. I needed some other files later and Win98 will not even recognize that the Floppy has a disk in it until I get a recovery disk from Sony, although I can still boot on a win98 setup floppy. (This makes absolutely no sense to me, but that is the way it is) I used PCsync and connected my desktop to the Sony via serial cable, the same as for PCAnywhere, and copied the files this way. You might check if Linux has anything equivalent or if you have a dual boot system, copy the cds to the hardisk, then install from there. Serial port is slow, but if the USB is working, you can also do the same trick with USB. (again, have to wait for the recovery disk from Sony before I can do that with my machine). You can delete the cds after installation then to get your harddisk space back. Of course, this assumes you have access to another computer.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Art

-----Original Message----- From: Al Sutton [mailto:al@alsutton.com] Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2002 12:52 PM To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: [SLE] Big Problem: SuSE 8.0 on a Sony Vaio and all machine with USB floppys

Guys,

I think I've spotted a bit problem with SuSE Linux 8.0 that will affect all machines which have USB floppy and/or CD drives.

I've already installed 7.3 onto my Sony Vaio which has no built-in floppy or CD drive, and relys on a USB floppy and/or CD drive to access floppy disks or CD-ROMS.

7.3 only required one disk to start the install, which can be used because the booting of the first disk uses the BIOS interrupts which work without a problem because the Sony BIOS maps the USB drive into the normal BIOS interrupts.

8.0 requires two disks, the first disk boots the kernel, and then uses the kernel to read the second disk (modules disk 1). The problem is that modules disk 1 contains the USB drivers and so the kernel can't read the floppy

disk.

This means I now have a SuSE 7.3 laptop with no way of upgrading it to 8.0. I'd appreciate any comments, but if I can't find a way of doing it I'll need to switch to RedHat 7.3 in order to get KDE 3.0.

Please help.

Al.