Robert A. Klahn wrote: > 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. The dd program copied all the blocks from input to output. The cd at /dev/hdb just didn't seem to do anything. Here is some info from boot up. hda: ST32140A ATA Disk ide0 at Ox1f0-0x1f7 0x3f6 on irq 14 hda: ST32140A 2015m x/128kb Cache CHS=4095/16/163 Partition check hda: [PTBL][1023/64/63] hda1 hda2: Just wondering. There are some BOS settings for the ide devices. Do I need to set the BIOS like the 4095/16/163? Is this weird that the partition check shows a different set of numbers, 1023/64/63? > Its also possible that your floppy set is bad. Floppys are notoriously poor media. You may want to try recreating them. The floppy was bad when I tried this morning. I made a new one and the system did install(at least I was able to complete all the steps) but on boot it just printed the following. L 40 40 40 40 ... forever until I hit the reset switch > 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. This sounds like a good idea but is this firmware update capable or does the chip have to be replaced. This is a pretty old system also. > 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.