I am trying to install Suse 9.2 through ftp. My CD burner happens to be dead, so I am trying to make some boot floppies. I followed the directions on their website, which say to make 3 boot floppies as well as another one for networking modules.

However, the 2nd and 3rd boot floppies do not appear to contain any files except for one readme file. The first boot floppy and the modules one seem ok. I tried installing anyway, thinking that maybe I just couldn't see them through windows, but it gave me an i/o error when it was reading from the 2nd disk.

I downloaded the boot image files both from a mirror and from suse's ftp site, and both versions only produce a single readme file. The readme file basically just says "This is Suse installation boot disk 2." I also tried opening the image files with Winimage, and Winimage also shows that the 2nd and 3rd boot floppy disks contain only a readme file.

What should I do? Am I doing something wrong, or did Suse just screw up with the boot floppy images?

Maybe you downloaded corrupted files. To make it easy, these are the files you need to download:

ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/ftp.../boot/bootdsk1
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/ftp.../boot/bootdsk2
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/ftp.../boot/bootdsk3
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/ftp.../boot/modules3

Notice that all 4 files are 1440 KB.

nope. i tried those just now, but they also have just the readme file. i had also tried from suse.com and from gatech.edu's ftp sites...no luck, they're all exactly the same (same size too).

anything else i could do?

I have downloaded all 4 files from same ftp server; they all work. My suggestion is to check your floppies; maybe some are damaged.