A long time ago.. I had a problem booting 1.2 on my i386. It would boot fine,
then the INSTALL kernel would hang in the floppy detect.  I remember the fix
having to do with needing to rejumper the floppy drives, and have TWO installed
in order to get 1.3 booted.  If you reconfigured the kernel and pulled fd1 out,
it would boot fine..  The configuration would work fine under 1.1, and boot a
1.1 INSTALL kernel just fine.. but the 1.2 kernel would hang on the exact same
setup.  Re-jumpering and adding a second drive fixed it. (I remember being very
bent about this, and having to try all possible jumper configs until it finally
worked)

Well, it's been a few years.. And I haven't had any problems with that in
awhile..  now the other night I was installing 1.3 release on an old 486-66,
and kaboom.. It blew up on the floppy probe.  It boots fine, gets down to the
floppy probe and just wedges. It detects the existing drive fine.. but it
wedges after detecting fd0. (The only drive in the machine)

The floppy is fine.. I've used this same floppy drive to boot about 4 different
machines off. (I swap the drive in.. install, and get it out of there.. most of
my machines have no floppy).   I can get BSD installed on here.. thats not a
really big deal, I just need to swap the drive into a running machine and newfs
it..  But I think there is a nasty bug here.. that was introduced somewhere
between 1.2 and 1.1. It may be a controller/drive match that causes this
particular bug, but this is a controller that I just bought.. And I tried a
different controller, with the same problem.   (Along with a different drive,
cables, etc etc etc)  Perhaps it is a BIOS wierd.

I can reproduce this problem quite regularly..  But I'm not sure where to start
on fixing it.

Has anyone else had this problem?  Am I the only one experiencing this strange
hangup?  I'm planning to make a custom INSTALL kernel with fd1 removed and
attempt an install with that..  If that succeeds (which I'm fairly certain it
will.. that was another fix for the 1.1 -> 1.2 incompatibility) then there may
be a bug in our floppy detection routines.

Any information on this would be highly appreciated.. I'd like to take a crack
at re-installing on wed. or thursday this week.

---
Tim Rightnour    -  root@garbled.net
http://www.zynetwc.com/~garbled/garbled.html