floppies and such

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 08:47 -0700, Sean Roe wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I am having such a brain cramp, I am installing debian on a new box with a 
> linksys gigabit card, which uses the realtek 8169 chipset.  Of course the 
> debian installer doesn't have the drivers for it, so I went and found them 
> and compiled them (it?) and went to put it on a floppy but I am not sure 
> what format to put it on.  I tried the a standard winblows format and a 
> fdformat with ext3 and cp'd the file over to the drive but the new box 
> can't seem to find the driver r8169.o  Any ideas?
----
I thought most of the 2.6 kernels had the realtek 8169 module...

# ls -l /lib/modules/2.6.12-1.1376_FC3/kernel/drivers/net/r8169.ko
-rwxr--r--  1 root root 34528 Aug 26
21:11 /lib/modules/2.6.12-1.1376_FC3/kernel/drivers/net/r8169.ko

As far as floppies go - I pulled my hair out a few weeks ago...I never
use floppies any more.

Turned out that most of my floppy disks (even many unused disks) were
bad - they were old. And the floppy in the server that I bought used was
bad (probably too much dust) and I spent a bunch of hours trying to move
a file from one machine to another.

Linux couldn't care less whether the disk were ext3 or fat. You need to
format it completely just to make sure it's good - test the disk on a
3rd computer to eliminate possibilities of one or the other floppy drive
being bad - when you never use them and the system is running a lot,
they clog up with dust/dirt.

Craig