[lug] zeros and ones from a boot disk

[cool at lwn.net]

This question comes to you third-hand, so my apologies if I'm
lacking detail that would be useful in answering it.

My nephew lives out in Ohio and I recently gave him a copy of
SuSE Linux 7.1 to try installing, since he is interested in
trying out Linux and because SuSE comes with a good manual set
that I thought would be useful to him.  Robby is thirteen and
knowledgeable about computers, but not a computer whiz by any
means, or a programmer.

He tried the installation first here in Colorado on an older
computer belonging to my father.  That worked okay.  Note that,
because my Dad works with alternate boot managers, Robby did
not install lilo directly onto the hard drive, but instead
created a boot floppy that he could use to boot Linux.

Then he went home and tried the same installation on his own
machine in Ohio, a relatively new (only a year old) machine.
He first attempted to install Linux on a second harddrive
on the system which was double-spaced.  Amazingly enough,
the installation appeared to work and the system was useable,
until he went to reboot it from his new boot disk.  When he
inserted the floppy and booted the system, it spewed a sequence
of zeros and ones across the screen continuously and failed
to boot.

We thought perhaps the double-spaced hard drive was the culprit
or a bad floppy, so he got a brand-new 32GB harddrive (7200 rpm)
and tried the installation again, with a different floppy for
the boot disk.  Again, the installation went just fine, the system
was useable, but when he went to reboot the system from the
boot disk, he got a sequence of zeros and ones spilled across the
screen and no boot.

Robby doesn't have Internet access, so I'm relaying his question
for him.  Does anyone have an idea of what might be going wrong,
or what should be done to fix it?  I'll be happy to relay any
questions or suggestions.

Liz Coolbaugh
cool at lwn.net