Eric: I think your problems might be more hardware than software. I think your IDE hard drive, or perhaps the CDROM drive, is suspect. The first thing I would do is boot off the rescue floppy and see if I can read the hard disk and CD-ROM without issue. 1) boot off the rescue floppy and get to a root shell prompt..... 2) Read the entire hard disk (this will take quite a while, depending upon the size of the drive): dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=64k 3) dd will either read the entire hard disk without issue, or will barf with an I/O error. 4) do the same for the CD-ROM drive. Put in a cd, DONT MOUNT IT, and repeat number 2, just with "if=/dev/hdc", or hdb, or whereever your drive is. Its also possible that your floppy set is bad. Floppys are notoriously poor media. You may want to try recreating them. I also think there is a BIOS upgrade to permit booting off the CDROM drive. This would be your best choice, if possible, as CDROM is much more reliable. Bob. On Thu, 14 Feb 2002 15:25:10 -0700 Eric Richardson wrote: > Hi, > > I'm having a lot of problems with a debian 2.2 install. First, the > hardware is a cyrix 686 with an intel mainboard and an ide hard drive > and a CD rom. I installed Debian a couple of times and was attempting to > get the network running and things went weird. > > All of a sudden after running a couple of hours the permissions of > things started to go weird. On boot, unix.o couldn't create file and > reported the filesystem was read only. Later when I was trying to > apt-get install isapnptools the apt-get executable had no execute > permissions, something like S--------. Other programs would not execute > either and I was forced to shutoff the power as I couldn't shutdown or > do anything. I had used the disk 1 successfully previously to install > dhcpcd which removed pump. > > Next I booted with the recover floppy but when it mounted the / > partition and tried to boot but the kernel panic'ed with a checksum or > something. At this point I probably should have run fs2chk or something > but chose to reinstall. > > The reinstall seemed to go fine until I reached the point of the base > system install and the system won't untar the base_2.2gz. This is a > floppy install for the kernel as the BIOS doesn't have the CD boot > support. I used the boot and root floppies but then try to install the > rest of the system off the CD. The CD seems to work fine but as said > before has problems on the untarring the base2_2.gz. I searched the /var > dir but could find an installer.log or something and nothing in messages > that helps. Because of the previous filesystem corruption? I suspected > the hard disk but there could be other problems. The install disks are > the cheapbytes silver non-cdr disks and I have used them for other > installs and loading 2.2 software so I don't suspect them but perhaps > tthey are bad or the CD? I really don't have a clue other than something > very non normal is going on. Can I get a complete functioning bootable > system out of only the floppies or do I need the base portion off the > CD. I don't have a CD burner so I have to get install disks elsewhere. > > Any help, ideas, etc. welcome. > > Eric > > ________________________________________________ > See http://PLUG.phoenix.az.us/navigator-mail.shtml if your mail doesn't post to the list quickly and you use Netscape to write mail. > > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss -- Robert A. Klahn rklahn@acm.org AIM: rklahn Yahoo Messenger: klahn IRC: rklahn@irc.openprojects.net "Hope has two beautiful daughters: Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to struggle to create things as they should be." - St. Augustine