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 --