Hi. I'm a newbie to this so if I'm missing something obvious, please tell me...

I'm trying to install suse 8.1 on a Toshiba 3490CT, with no CDROM, usb or otherwise. All I've got is a PCMCIA ethernet card and a usb floppy.

I've gotten as far as linuxrc and I was going to try to get it into YAST with NFS on another machine, where I've set it up for nfs.

But when I try to load the PCMCIA driver on my laptop now, it won't read my floppy. It prompts me to ask for the module4 floppy but when I go to put it in, it gives me "error reading floppy disk".

I made the floppies for the drivers this way:
dd if=/mnt/cdrom/boot/modules4 of=/dev/fd0u1440

but none of my module disks will read. I thought there was something wrong with my floppy drive so I tried rebooting all over again and it reads the bootdisk just fine and the module1 disk is ok, too, before it goes into linuxrc where i can load the drivers.

Am I doing something wrong?

Make sure you've got the device name correct - sounds silly, but when you issue that command, does your floppy drive make all its usual noise?

Make sure you've formatted the disk with:
fdformat

The only other thing I've found is that some guides specify the -bs=32 option. Don't know why changing the number of bytes read/written at onces would have an impact... but wouldn't hurt to try.

Yeah, floppy goes clich clich clich and the light comes on (I've done mis-called the device name before so I tripled checked that).

I also did an fdformat /dev/fd0u1440 and an fdformat /dev/fd0 but neither worked.

I've also tried re-specifying how the image is to be written to the floppy with:

dd if=/mnt/cdrom/boot/modules4 of=/dev/fd0 bs=32b

and I also tried

dd if=/mnt/cdrom/boot/modules4 of=/dev/fd0 bs=8k

and also

dd if=/mnt/cdrom/boot/modules4 of=/dev/fd0 bs=2x80x18b

But none of that worked either.

Is there some order you in which you need to load the drivers?

blahrg.... that doesn't make any sense.
Try using another floppy? Maybe that one's just kaput.

As long as it's asking for a specific disk, and you're inserting the right one, and you've done what you've described... I'm out of ideas!

one thing: you said fdformat "didn't work". Did that operation fail, or did it just not fix the problem?

--Rounan

EDIT: typo

Yeah, no kidding, I'm baffled, too.

The fdformat operation did not fail -- it formatted ok. Everything looks ok on the surface. I exhausted the possibility that the floppy drive making the disks had failed by making a new bootdisk and it booted ok and got me back to that exact same place (my USB drive had failed for a while and I didn't know it and I couldn't even get into linuxrc for the longest time so I went and got another USB floppy drive).

I've made 4 separate disks already and still get the same error message!

Am I going mad?


Is there any workaround I could try?

Think it would work if I tried singing to it?

USB floppy drive.... uh-oh....

It's possible that the installer's confused. Your BIOS may recognize and boot from the usb floppy, but the installer is assuming that the drive is at /dev/fdo.
Try making symlinks at /dev/fd0 and /dev/floppy to /dev/fd0u1440

that's all I got.
If that doesn't work, try singing.

--Rounan