[lug] zeros and ones from a boot disk

[D. Stimits]

I'm not sure what you mean by double-spaced; I am assuming that is a
"windows only" compression, and that any ext2 or linux partition does
not actually use this. You might have him test if he can boot normally
from a rescue disk, Tom's Root Boot (though without net access it could
be a problem):
http://www.toms.net/rb/home.html

Or try to boot the SuSE cd in rescue mode, but a floppy will tell you
more about whether the floppy itself works right. A big question is "how
did he create the floppy?"

In general, the 1's and 0's might make me wonder if the kernel image was
too large for the floppy or the initial ramdisk that it unpacks into,
causing it to overflow. This is a good reason to try a Tom's Root Boot,
because I know they work and will not overflow a floppy or the ramdisk.
During a compile of kernel, if you choose to support initial ramdisk,
you can also choose a larger default size. Which also reminds me, I
wonder if it failed to support the floppy itself? If so, it'd work fine
until the loader transfers control to the kernel, and the kernel tries
to grab something from the floppy.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

cool at lwn.net wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
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