Subject: Install floppy boot failure

From: "Christopher R. Hertel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 3 Aug 1996 22:16:27 -0500

Dear Debian Development Debuggers,

(couldn't resist that)

I am attempting to install Debian 1.1 on my system.  I currently run
Linux
1.2.8 (an older SlackWare distribution), so I know that the system is
capable of running Linux.

I've written the boot, root, & base floppies as prescribed, but every
time
I try to boot I get error messages as follows:

boot: <cr>
Loading...........
Uncompressing Linux...

invalid compressed format (err=2)

 -- System Halted
 
I've tried using a different floppy, erasing (dd if=/dev/zero...) and
reformatting the floppies, formatting on different machines with
different
utilites (Norton format, DOS 6.x format, Weeners '95 format), and I've
tried re-downloading the boot image from a variety of sources.

All with the same result.

I also tried entering boot parameters to specify my SCSI & ethernet
cards.  This resulted in a different error message:

 incomplete literal tree

Well, where do I go from here?

Chris Hertel -)-----
.

-- 
Christopher R. Hertel -)-----                   University of Minnesota
[email-masked]              Networking and Telecommunications Services

---

From: Mike Taylor <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 4 Aug 1996 10:52:49 -0400 (EDT)

> Well, where do I go from here?

I noticed when I was making my installation disks that three of the four
images needed nearly every possible block on the floppy.  When I was
formating the floppys, I noticed that the the format program marked quite
a few bad blocks on one of the floppys, so I didn't use it.

You might try reformatting your suspected bad installation disks to see if
the format program reports any bad blocks.  If you get some, that might
be your problem.  If not, maybe one of the files that you are making the
disks from is corupt.

Hope this helps.

Mike