Baslinux mailing list

["Matt Wilkie" <maphew AT gmail.com>]

Hi, I'm trying to install BasicLinux on an IBM Thinkpad 755C laptop,
12mb ram & 328mb hard drive. It's only media for installing is a
1.44mb floppy drive.

I've downloaded the two BSL 3.40 floppies and written them to disk. I
can boot the laptop from the floppies and run BSL, though I have to
retry several times inserting the second disk. The trick seems to be
to remove disk1 from the drive, hit enter, wait for the errors to go
by, and then put the second disk in.

I've followed steps 1-3 for preparing the hard drive for install.
install-to-hd fails though with hundreds of "attempt to read beyond of
device" errors. I have to do the same trick here to get BSL to notice
when the first floppy is inserted again.  I read through the
install-to-hd script and ran each of the commands manually. This
worked fine up until "cp /fd/zimage /hd/boot/" at which point I get
the beyond device errors again.

So I conclude either the floppy drive/cotroller is failing or BSL just
doesn't grok it's disk-is-changed language. However it *is* working
enough for me to boot from the floppies. Is there some other way I can
get the zimage installed? Perhaps copying from an msdos formatted
floppy? Where can I get this image from? I found one here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/add-ons/2_2_26/
but don't know if that is compatible with the boot floppies.

oh yeah, I've tried different disks, used full format rather than
quick format, and run chkdsk on them from a windows 2000 computer.

thanks in advance for your thoughts,

--
-matt