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Message from David
==================

peter wrote:
> firstly, apologies if i reply in the wrong place because im not used to
> using forums like this one.

Your reply showed up correctly, at least in my mail client.

> ok, so i checked several floppy disks and theyre
> ok and i checked by reformatting disks on a win3.1 system, a win95 system
> and a win98 system.

That doesn't mean that the floppy is perfect. All 3 of those operating
systems will tolerate a few errors (by reducing the amount of space
available on the floppy). However, your floppy disk needs to be
perfect, that is, all 1474560 bytes of the floppy must work correctly.

> list.. so properties is not telling me the truth? 1,474,560 bytes by all
> other accounts *is* 1.44mb .. so i now understand more about ms dos (sort
> of) as i attempt to get into linux but im still no closer to booting the
> 'floppy BL3' os.  :|  how much potential space does an unformatted '1.44mb'
> floppy have i wonder? and is this relevant to the solution of the problem!?
> or, dare i say again, is your file too big? cordiali saluti - peter

The BasicLinux 3 disk1 is not too big. But you cannot simply copy it
to a formatted disk. Did you follow the directions in the readme.txt
file which was provided with the BasicLinux package? Here's what my
copy says:

--quote--
In DOS, you use rawrite.exe or fdimage.exe to write raw images.
The BL3 zip file includes fdimage.exe.  Here is the command:
---------------------
fdimage disk1.img  a:
---------------------

WARNING:  The floppy used for disk 1 must be perfect (no bad sectors).
         The routines for writing raw images are not error-tolerant.
--end quote--

So, what does fdimage say after you execute it? Can you try a
different floppy if it fails? If it still doesn't work, I suggest that
you try the DOS or QEMU versions of BasicLinux.

HTH,
David