mycroft@gnu.ai.mit.edu writes:
 >    I just bought an Aero 4/25 (sounds like a chocolate bar here in
 >    the UK) and 1.0 reports "unknown density" for the floppy drive then
 >    panics when it can't ount root (suprised ?)
 > 
 > This means either:
 > 
 > 1) The drive isn't configured in the BIOS, so the kernel doesn't know
 > what size it is.
 > 
 > 2) The type field for the drive is `weird'.  In this case it would print
 > out `fdcN: drive M: unknown device type 0xL0' (where N, M, and L are
 > variable).

The aero floppy drive hangs off the back of a PCMCIA card, and uses
the one and only slot in the machine when in use. This is no doubt the
problem.

Since you haven't yet purchased it, Peter, I'll tell my story. I was
at first quite taken by the aero, but after playing with one for a
while, and looking at the condition of one that someone else had been
using for a couple of months, I wasn't very impressed. I ended up
buying, for the same price, the Zenith ZLITE, with 2 pcmcia slots and
bigger hard disk. Its a much nicer machine all around. Not long after
the purchase, compaq dropped their prices considerably to reflect
this, but I'd still have gotten the ZLITE.  Just my opinion, in case
it's useful to you.  I haven't yet tried running NetBSD on it, though,
it's a Windows machine for my girlfriend. I heard back from several
people running linux happily on them, but not from anyone running bsd.

--
Dan.