Floppy? What's that?

With the advent of the bootable CD and floppy boot images, I have managed to live without a floppy for over a year now. OK, maybe I had to borrow a USB floppy drive once or twice for some twisted OS (maybe a BeOS or BSD-like release). However, every flavor of Windows and nearly every Linux distro can boot just fine from CD (again, even if I have to use a bootable floppy image). Oh yeah, I do keep a small (say, 50MB) bootable DOS partition on a second hard drive. So, I still have access to goodies like Ghost, PartitionMagic, Ranish, etc. I'll occasionally boot ZipSlack and KNOPPIX from the DOS command line.

I will admit, however, if I can find an LS-120/240 IDE drive for cheap ($20), I'd buy it in a hearbeat! It would be a nice complement to my Zip250 IDE drive which as trouble booting *my* system.

It's time for legacy components to really disappear. I'd exclusively use USB for *external* devices if every OS I try properly supported it. And this is with a platform (AMD's second SMP Athlon chipset ... ?762?) which has well-documented problems with USB.

Anyway, ...

I may have run into a (hardware) problem with the DVD. In trying to install to the hard drive via knx-hdinstall onto a 4GB partition, ...

... using reiserfs seems to stall exactly at "41%." All of the processes seem to go to "you-know-where" in a hand basket. The disk LED is active the entire time, but everything else freezes

... using xfs stalls a "1%" with the same behavior as bove.

My prior attempts to use ext3 seemed to fail because of disk space. I'll have to give it one more try before I start drawing conclusions. I'm hoping that this WD1200JB is not the problem. But I am sure as heck gonna make sure my backups are up-to-date.

-SUO