Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Sun, 25 Jan 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> Today I tried, after making a floppy disk version of BL2 on this machine, 
> to boot from it.

(The machine would not copy Xvesa from a floppy disk recently and it won't 
install Win98).


A floppy disk version of BL 2.0 worked fine in this machine.

So I took the BL2.1 disks from this machine to another machine and they 
did not work there either.  Disk 1 loaded halfway I think - anyway disk 1 
did not work.  So I redid DIsk 1 (ran the make-fd program halfway and then 
rebooted) and tried this pair of disks again.  This time it got stuck on 
Disk2 - COmpressed image found at block 0 - and nothing else happened.


I tried to remake bothdisks but it copied something to disk2 and told me 
disk full.  I had deleted all previous files and it was 100% good last I 
formatted but I formatted again to be sure.  This time it seemed to copy 
all the files but when I tried to boot from these disks it told me for 
disk 2:  Data error reading A.  So I started over with a different disk 2.

This time it also told me disk full so I did a full rather than a quick 
format on it.  format /u.  I got 100% good.

I tried to make_fd and again was told disk full 0 files copied.

(the first time on the first machine this may have happened without me 
noticing it).

So the first machine made a bad disk1 and they are both having trouble 
copying to freshly formatted 100% good 1.44MB floppy disks that have no 
files on them - disk full, or it seems to copy but then won't load.

Has anyone other than Steven used his new make_fd program from BL2.1 with 
better luck than this?  

The second linux computer has been doing everything perfectly up to now,
unless you count the fact that the first one (DFI) could not read a floppy 
disk created by the second one.  Do I have two computers that will not let 
me write to floppy disks with linux?  

I have BL2.1 on a third computer and will test it some day. I was able to 
write linux files to floppy with it that ran in another linux computer.

In the meantime I will take very good care of my BL2.0 floppy disks.


> Half of this disk has now been loaded.  (This is Disk 1, with three files)
> 
> General Failure Error reading drive A
> 
> Abort, retry, ...., fail
> 
> I typed f for fail.
> 
> At this point Steven's program ignored the failure and told me anyway to:
> 
> Insert DISK2.  
> Strike any key when ready.
> 
> I did this to see what would happen and got
> 
> Divide overflow.
> 
> 
> Is this a motherboard problem of some sort?
> 
> I will eventually replace this computer with a few others but would like 
> to learn from my problem.
> 
> I will try another set of BL2 floppy disks in this computer, and this set 
> in another computer, and report back unless I get the predicted outcome of 
> nothing working on this computer and everything working on another 
> computer.
> 
> I was going to use floppy disk BL2 in a laptop with working floppy drive 
> to download BL1.  Someone just gave us a 33K external modem.  Then we can 
> transfer (via DOS llpro or linux plip and another computer which does 
> have a CD-ROM drive) the .tgz files from the SW3.5 CD.
> 
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