Hi,

I am struggling to get Debian onto my nice new Toshiba Portege m200. Here are the problems I have run into so far:

1. The cd is usb and cannot be used to boot the Debian CDs (or Gentoo LiveCD or Knoppix for that matter)
2. I need to use the bf2.4 flavor so I can get my ethernet card working but bf1.4 cannot be run from dos and when I run it from a floppy I get:

VFS: Insert root floppy disk to be loaded into RAM disk and press ENTER
request_module[block major-2]: root fs not mounted
kernel panic-VFS unable to mount root fs on 02:00

3. This website: http://www.adebenham.com/laptop/toshiba_m200.html says installing IS possible but that guy/gal set up another computer as a network boot server. I don't have the luxury of being able to do this. He/she mentions he used the debian-installer images. What are those?

Thanks for reading...

Debian

that bf2.4 should be the floppy images that you need in an iso format (they are bootable). you need to either use:

from linux:

dd if=./bf2.4_floppy_image.iso of=/dev/fd0

or from dos you need rawright (which is like dd but for dos).

then just get the laptop to boot from floppy.

Your CD should be ok to boot the deb cd from. have you got USB enabled in the bios (legacy or whatever its called?), how do you boot up XP or something as thats a bootable CD?

Thanks for replying! I've tried both rawrite3 and fdvol but neither helped. I'm not sure I understand about the isos though. Where can those be found? So far I've only seen bins and a few img. I got my bf2.4 bins (linux.bin, root.bin, driver-1 through 4.bin) off of ftp.debian.org in the current\bf2.4 folder. Where can I find these isos you speak of? I looked around on the internet and these forms before and it seems many slackware users seem to have this same problem but so far I found no relevent (or understandable, perhaps) solutions.

With my usb CD, it starts up ok and I can load things like the "Ultamite Boot CD" and my recovery disk but, for example, Knoppix just kinda starts to load then says it can't and spits me out to a (very limited) command prompt.

I now had Debian unstable running on the machine. The computer actually can load and install from the Gentoo CD. It just takes an "exit" when the boot processes complains. Hopefully a "how I did it" will be forth coming, dare-I-say, soon.

Now, if only I could get the wacomcpl to work and Xfree86's randr would actually include rotate!