On Fri, 24 Jan 1997, Marc Theisen wrote:
 
> after formatting my brand new Quantum Fireball under RISC-OS 3.7
> giving the ADFS partition 1.5GB and reserving the remaining 0.6GB
> to RiscBSD I tried to follow the instructions in the file 'install'.
> At first I exchanged my SA110 with my old 'bangered' ARM610 :-(

Only need to do that to ungzip the SA110 kernel...  you can change back
once you've got a decompressed kernel.

> Then I followed the instructions printed out onto several white pages...
> In the manual I encountered "... copy the kernels to the RiscBSD
> directory ...". Ok, I decided to unzip any kernel I found. Later on,

You only need one kernel, (one that's appropriate to CPU)  Generally the
later the more stable it is.

Which Kernel?  if it's after about 4871 I heard there were some floppy
disc problems, try an earlier one.

> coming up to the point to boot RiscBSD, at first everything seemed to
> go well but then, after showing much a hardware information, the kernel
> printed "Panic: Cannot load floppy image". The FB 2.1GB was recognized
> during startup, also were my 16MB DRAM and 1MB VRAM. Some kernels also 
> recognized some type of CDROM (I use a Mitsumi 8x).
Some kernels don't have ATAPI support in them...

> Maybe the following 'snapshots' will clarify my problem:
> 
> ... <Hardware-Info>
> wd0 <Harddisc-Info>
> fd0 at fdc0 drive 1: density unknown
> rd0 ...
> swap dev 1009 -> -512 bytes
note swap device won't be configured yet...

> ...
> Loading ramdisc: 0Kpanic: Cannot load floppy image
> ...<Debugging stuff>
> 
> At this stage, everything I could do was typing CTRL-D to reboot.
> 
> Ok, is it possible that RiscBSD does not understand my PC floppy drive?
> I had to exchange my original HD-floppy with a standard PC drive and now
> RISC-OS hangs for one second before doing the RAM-tests.

I think there's some subtle differences, does the flop_write work?
 
Does the drive work ok for ADFS floppies?

The only other possiblity is to borrow a friends floppy drive and see if
that works.  It's known that PC drives lack a switch or jumper that Acorn
drives have (although the drives are identical, it just costs 30 quid more
to have the switch or something ;)

Hope this helps

Chris Gilbert