Hi,

I’m trying to understand the Debian network install process. I have an old laptop without a cd-rom drive, therefore, I must do a network install.

I think there are two basic steps that I need to do in order to start the install process. 1) Make some boot floppies and 2) get them to recognize my Etherlink III (3c589d) PCMCIA network card.

I’ve searched around for how to make the boot floppies and I understand that I have to raw write the bin images but I don’t know WHICH images to download at this link:

http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dist...in/disks-i386/

Can somebody tell me which image(s) I would need to download to boot into the install program and which image the install program would need to get the driver for my NIC from?

Thanks!

Ok, I now belive that I need to use the rescue floppy in order to do a fresh install, even if the machine never had linux on it.

So I created a floppy, booted from it, pressed the <enter> key at the boot: promt.

I heard the system reading from the floppy for a bit and then I got this:

boot:
Loading linux.bin...........
Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue.

I changed disks a couple times thinking i had some bad floppies but now I belive something else is wong.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

maybe you should describe more in detail what happens... ?

I just did this. No errors though.

you will need the boot.img, root.img, and network drivers image as a minimum. I also needed the CD image (had a cdrom, but it is broken) as something on that disk allowed me to see and partition my hd - couldn't do it without.

as for your error, well, my best guess would be that the disk write had an error, but you said you tried 'a couple times'. Don't know what a couple of times is, but when I was looking for this, I got the feeling that some floppies have alot of bad spots on the disk and that a person should make 3-5 boot disks, just in case. Just my feelings based from what I saw. The disk size matches the img file size, right?

I used these disks to do a network install of woody on my old laptop which also lacks a CD-drive.

http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dist...es-1.44/bf2.4/

boot with rescue, then continue with root...