From: bketcham@stein2.u.washington.edu (Benjamin Ketcham) Subject: doinstall can't find my floppy past diska2, SLS 0.99pl6 Date: 1 May 1993 01:33:12 GMT
I'm still in need of help getting SLS 0.99pl6 to install.
Please note that the problem I am having is mentioned in FAQ III.18, but
the suggested answer does not solve my problem.
Using fdisk, I create a root partition and a swap partition (changing the
type of the swap partition with 't'), use mke2fs on the root partition,
mkswap on the swap partition. So far, no problem.
Then I try to use doinstall. It loads in the contents of diska2 without
complaint. But when I put in diska3, it complains that "You may have
inserted the wrong disk". It also does this with any of the other disks
in the distribution. There is no sign that the disk drive is accessed
at all (ie, no light, no sound, no difference, actually, whether there is
any disk in there at all or not).
Furthermore, when I put diska2 back in and try to sync before rebooting,
Linux complains that it can't execute the binary file, or something of
the sort. Also, other commands such as ls are similarly inaccessible.
(And everything worked fine before doinstall.)
OK, so I read the FAQ, see this problem in III.18, and check all the disks
in the distribution (from DOS). They all have the required disk ID files.
One fellow suggested that maybe the floppy cable was loose. It doesn't
seem to be. In fact, another completely different drive shows the same
symptoms.
Also suggested was to try
mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt
which similarly shows no signs of even trying to access the drive, and
returns the error "Unknown error 26240" (from either of the two drives
I have tried).
sysinstall -mount
asks (repeatedly) for a floppy, but once again never accesses the drive.
So it looks to my naive Linux-newbie eyes like SLS sysinstall is failing
to find my fd0, and not only fails itself, but also screws up some table
somewhere such that Linux can't find it either, even though it could
before SLS put its dirty paws all over the table.
Anyone who has a solution, or at least more ideas of things to try to
narrow down the problem, will make my day (or night, as the case may be).
--ben
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Here's my system info (let me know if any other information is needed):
AMD 386/40 (I tried this with turbo off, too)
Cyrix 83D87 coprocessor
16 meg RAM
AMI BIOS
Maxtorr 340 meg IDE HDD (with 100 meg DOS partition)
Silicon Valley Computer combined hard/floppy controller
two different no-name 1.44 meg 3.5" floppy drives (I tried one at a time
as the only floppy drive in the system, not both at the same time)
I'm using the ex2fs, although I also tried it with the Minix fs with
similar results. I've tried various sizes for the root and swap
partitions, with seemingly no effect on the problem.
I've tried installing various levels of the distribution, from minimal