>Randy Terbush writes:
>> I did manage to get beyond this by frigging the BIOS, however no
>> matter how much frigging I do to it (I've even whispered sweet
>> things to it, and not so sweet) I cannot get it to mount the
>> floppy as root. Panics right after message "mounting fd0a".
>
>Look at your messages. You might notice that the probe fails to find
>fd0 even though it successfully booted off the disk. I have had
>friends have this problem before. I don't have an explanation for it,
>but putting DDB into the kernel on the floppy might be valuable since
>that would permit an attempt to see what is going on that prevents the
>floppy from probing.

I bet fd0a is a 5.25" floppy, right?

For some reason and with some models of floppy drives, when you boot off of
a 5.25" floppy, it's in a weird state at boot time and doesn't get probed.
This problem has been around for a while (why haven't I sent in a PR on it?
I haven't had a chance to investigate it much).  This can probably be fixed
by strengthening the probe code in fd.c.

--Ken