I am attempting to install Debian using boot floppies. (Yes, real old-fashioned 3 1/2" floppies.) At one point it asked me to put in the rescue floppy. So I put in the same disk I started with, and it said "installing the rescue floppy." This message stayed up fot about five hours (in fact, it's still running now.) I can hear the drive running.

Is it normal for it to take that long or is there a problem? I know floppies are slower then the rest of the machine, but I didn't think by that much.

I am using an Athlon 700 processor. Darned if I knew the brand of the floppy drive.

No. The floppy may be bad. If you are using the 3.0 CD, forego the bootable floppy. There is already a rescue image on the CD. At the boot prompt, type
where 'rescbf24' is the rescue image and '/dev/hdaX' is the boot partition. use one of the function keys for names of other rescue images and boot parameters.

If you don't have cd-rom though, you can try other diskettes or just skip the rescue floppy altogether.

I am using a non-bootable CD-RW.

I know there are rescue images on the CD, because I lifted one off of it using RaWrite to make the disk I use now. There are actually two files named rescue.bin. (One is in install\, one is in distros\woody\main\images-i386\30.2.3-2002-05-21\images-1.44\) Maybe I should use one for the initial boot and one for the kernel installation?

EDIT: By the way, I did try installing the kernel from the CD. Said it couldn't find the files. I know they're there because they showed up when I browsed the disk on another computer.

That's really odd that it would not find rescbf24. Hit F3 and look at the rescue images available. You should have rescue, rescbf24, resccomp, and rescvan1. They are stored in /install.

rescue = /install/linpci
rescbf24 = /install/lin24
resccomp = /install/lincompt
rescvan1 = /install/linux