On Thu, 22 Nov 2001 22:26:56 Ian Douglas wrote:

I brought myself a copy of "Debian GNU/Linux Bible" today and tried installing Debian Potato on my PC from the CD bundled with the book. I used fips to create some space on my Windows hard disk, used rawrite to create the Rescue and Root floppies (my PC cannot boot from CDs), reset the PC with the Rescue floppy and CD inserted, watched loads of lines of text scroll past as the PC booted then finally received a message telling me to remove the Rescue disk insert the Root disk and press return. I put the Root disk in, hit return, a line of text appears briefly then my screen goes black and about a second later my PC resets (consistently). Anyone any idea what is causing the installation to crash?

In frustration I have (successfully) installed SuSE Linux on another hard disk which I can use in the PC to carry out tests (if anyone can suggest any worth doing) to help determine the cause of the Debian installation problem as I would like to be able to install and experiment with Debian Linux if possible.

A couple of possibilities spring to mind: corrupt floppies or a driver build into the default debian kernel conflicting with a different piece of hardware in your PC.

To deal with the corrupt floppies issue you use your SuSE distribution to compare the debian floppies against the image of these from the Debian CD:

cmp /dev/fd0 /cdrom/whereever-the-floppy-image-is

for each disk changing the right hand of the two paths to match the images you actually used from the Debian CD. Please also bear in mind that not all magazine cover disks have the correct versions of everything including the floppy images.

Regarding the kernel drivers problem, and official Debian CD set ships with a choice of boot floppy images containing various different kernels to suit different hardware. If you have that choice from your CD it may be worth trying on of the other ones. If these aren't on your CD you can find them on the Debian FTP site. Start with this directory: ftp:://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-i386/2.2.26-2001-06-14/images-1.44

And then check the sub-directories safe udma66 idepci compact each of which contains a slightly different build of the kernel.

Hope this helps. Steve.