Well, I just cleaned it, And I bought the actual Sony drive in un-used
form. THat still may be the case, but why does it have no problem
booting debian, or mounting the Netbsd cd from debian. Oh yeah, I've
been trying to boot the mini-root filesystem with no luck from the Swap
partition. It keeps saying "cannot open boot device", Or it just boot's
debian. What gives?

John Refling wrote:

> I'd get short reads on the floppy when the drive had not
> been used in such a long time that the lubricant had turned
> to goo, and the drive would spin at varying speeds, or not
> at all.
>
> If that is the problem, need to fix the drive.
>
> Perhaps similar mechanical error on the CDROM drive.