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It worked for me every time on 4 different computers and floppy's.  Have
you cleaned your drives lately?

On Thu, 2007-04-19 at 18:43 -0700, baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:
> 
> Message from David
> ==================
> below is my first attempt to reply to a message in the correct way, so i
> hope i havent deleted bits i shouldnt have or messed things up too much..
> 
> > 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.
> 
> ive formatted and checked several 1.44mb floppies and the dos format report
> in every case states 0 bytes in bad sectors. and dos or windows scandisk
> shows no bad blocks. to get half a dozen floppies with exactly the same
> missing space on them is not gonna be explained by excluded bad sectors..
> and what about the info google turned up? doesnt that explain where the
> missing space is? did you miss that bit? here it is again, pasted in
> verbatim from the web page ~>
> 512 bytes/sector x 18 sectors/track x 80 tracks/side x 2 sides = 1,474,560
> bytes or 2,880 sectors. But your computer always says it has "1,457,664
> bytes total disk space." Well, that's because you can't use the Boot sector,
> the two 12-bit FATs (File Allocation Tables; of 9 sectors each) or the
> fixed-size Root Directory (of 14 sectors) for storing data! So you're left
> with 2,880 - 1 - 18 - 14 = 2,847 sectors or 1,457,664 bytes for your files.
>               <~ are you not accepting that is the explanation as to why no
> matter which do$windoze system i try the available space on any empty
> formatted 1.44mb floppy is always gonna be 1,457,664 bytes?
> 
> The BasicLinux 3 disk1 is not too big. But you cannot simply copy it
> to a formatted disk. Did you follow the directions in the readme.txt
> file which was provided with the BasicLinux package?
> 
> i did what the readme said and used Fdimage.exe in a windows dos session and
> i tried it in a fresh booted dos session as well, so, no, im not dumb enough
> to try to copy Disk1.img rather than write it raw.. i copied to the 2nd
> floppy of course, as per instructions, without problem, but then that file
> is only 1,441,792 bytes which of course fits in a space of 1,457,664 bytes
> with room to spare.
> 
> So, what does fdimage say after you execute it?
> 
> i will run it again to get the exact words if you really need to know but
> basically it failed to execute because the file was too big for the
> available space (1,457,664 bytes)..
> 
> Can you try a different floppy if it fails?
> 
> have tried several and its the same exactly with every one..
> 
> If it still doesn't work, I suggest that you try the DOS version
> 
> no i dont want the loop one if thats what you mean
> 
> or QEMU version of BasicLinux.
> 
> wat dat?
> 
> relly would like to hear what you find when you format a 1.44mb floppy on a
> do$windoze system and then check by whatever means you like to find out how
> many bytes free space you get -->-> 1,457,664 bytes id say it will be :D
> 
> dont worry, i wont give up easily, staying heavily involved with big bills
> half-baked creations since 1998 proves i must be fairly resilient, lol..
> 
> peter (unixish)