Re: floppyless install?

[tibor lib uaa alaska edu]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2000, Jeff DeMaagd wrote:

> I am having a devil of a time trying to get the root floppy to work, I get
> this message:
> 
> kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fd on 2:00
> 
> I checked metalab and found no updated ramdisk.img, and I tried many
> different floppies and used rawrite at least twice per disc, but nothing
> changes this.
> 
> I also never get this line to work the first time after a reboot:
> 
> boot fd0:vmlinux.gz root=/dev/fd0
> 
> this doesn't work the first time either:
> 
> boot fd0:vmlinux.gz root=/dev/fd0 load_ramdisk=1
> 
> The error I get is a "bad magic" error, I didn't write down the exact
> numbers, but they were the same every time.
> 
> So, in conclusion, am I doing something obviously wrong, and is there a way
> to install Red Hat AXP Linux on this beast without the floppy?  I have
> always had floppy difficulties when installing Linux in the past.

I suspect you're probably doing nothing wrong at all.  I've been mirroring
RH from metalab internally for some time, and lately I've noticed that the
files I'm getting (via rsync) are frequently corrupted.  I then started
using the rsync option to do checksums, but the files are still corrupted 
(verified by md5summing against samples from RH, as well as "rpm -Vpl
<rpmfile>"), leading me to believe they're corrupted on metalab as well.
Of course I may just be wacked out on crack on this one, but I doubt it.

Unfortunately, many RH mirrors don't mirror from RH, but instead mirror
from metalab, so instead of trying another mirror you might try grabbing
the floppy images direct from one of Red Hat's servers and see if that
fixes things.

Mike
-- 
Mike Tibor         Univ. of Alaska Anchorage    (907) 786-1001 voice
Network Technician     Consortium Library         (907) 786-6050 fax
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