I have an IBM Thinkpad 355Cs on which I recently installed slackware-based tiny linux. Here is my installation process:
1. Insert boot disk into drive and turn power on
2. Type "ramdisk floppy=thinkpad" at the boot prompt. (Without this my hard drive geometry isn't auto-detected)
3. Insert 'quickroot' disk at prompt (quickroot does all the partitioning and formatting)
4. Insert disks 1-12 as prompted.
Tiny Linux works great with the old hardware, but I have one problem. When I try to access a mounted 1.44MB floppy disk on the 1.44MB drive I get an error that says the disk has been changed or removed, which it hasn't. Here are the commands I use to access a FAT fs floppy (as root):
^#mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
^#ls -l /mnt/floppy
This works fine. I can do an 'ls -l' on /mnt/floppy and see all my files, but when I try to execute, copy, or 'cat' any of the files, I get a drive error that says I changed or removed the disk, even though I didn't. I've tried using fd0h1440 and fd0u1440 with the same result. When I try to 'umount' and 'mount' the disk again, it doesn't work. The only way I can get the disk to mount is to reboot. I know the drive isn't defective because my version of linux used installed from FAT floppies after the kernel was running in ram. I have no important data on this computer so a complete reformat and reinstall is perfectly fine with me, although I have already tried it with no success. I would like to keep the same version of linux that I have because it's a great match to my old computer, but if there are better versions that install from floppies and require 8MB or less of ram and ~80MB of hard drive space, please suggest them.

Can anyone help me?