The biggest problem for people installing Debian for the first time seems to be floppy disk reliability.

The boot floppy is the floppy with the worst problems, because it is read by the hardware directly, before Linux boots. Often, the hardware doesn't read as reliably as the Linux floppy disk driver, and may just stop without printing an error message if it reads incorrect data. There can also be failures in the Driver Floppies most of which indicate themselves with a flood of messages about disk I/O errors.

If you are having the installation stall at a particular floppy, the first thing you should do is re-download the floppy disk image and write it to a different floppy. Simply reformatting the old floppy may not be sufficient, even if it appears that the floppy was reformatted and written with no errors. It is sometimes useful to try writing the floppy on a different system.

One user reports he had to write the images to floppy three times before one worked, and then everything was fine with the third floppy.

Other users have reported that simply rebooting a few times with the same floppy in the floppy drive can lead to a successful boot. This is all due to buggy hardware or firmware floppy drivers.

If you have problems and the kernel hangs during the boot process, doesn't recognize peripherals you actually have, or drives are not recognized properly, the first thing to check is the boot parameters, as discussed in Paragraaf 5.2, “Boot Parameters”.

If you are booting with your own kernel instead of the one supplied with the installer, be sure that CONFIG_DEVFS is not set in your kernel. The installer is not compatible with CONFIG_DEVFS.

Often, problems can be solved by removing add-ons and peripherals, and then trying booting again. Internal modems, sound cards, and Plug-n-Play devices can be especially problematic.

There are, however, some limitations in our boot floppy set with respect to supported hardware. Some Linux-supported platforms might not be directly supported by our boot floppies. If this is the case, you may have to create a custom boot disk (see ???), or investigate network installations.

If you have a large amount of memory installed in your machine, more than 512M, and the installer hangs when booting the kernel, you may need to include a boot argument to limit the amount of memory the kernel sees, such as mem=512m.

During the boot sequence, you may see many messages in the form can't find something , or something not present, can't initialize something , or even this driver release depends on something . Most of these messages are harmless. You see them because the kernel for the installation system is built to run on computers with many different peripheral devices. Obviously, no one computer will have every possible peripheral device, so the operating system may emit a few complaints while it looks for peripherals you don't own. You may also see the system pause for a while. This happens when it is waiting for a device to respond, and that device is not present on your system. If you find the time it takes to boot the system unacceptably long, you can create a custom kernel later (see Paragraaf 8.5, “Compiling a New Kernel”).

If you get through the initial boot phase but cannot complete the install, the bug reporter menu choice may be helpful. It copies system error logs and configuration information to a user-supplied floppy. This information may provide clues as to what went wrong and how to fix it. If you are submitting a bug report you may want to attach this information to the bug report.

Other pertinent installation messages may be found in /target/var/log/debian-installer/ during the installation, and /var/log/debian-installer/ after the computer has been booted into the installed system.

If you still have problems, please submit a bug report. Send an email to <submit@bugs.debian.org>. You must include the following as the first lines of the email:

Package: install
Version: version

Be sure to fill in version with the version of the debian-installer that you used. If you don't know the version number, fill in the date you downloaded the cd image, and include the location where you found it, or the source of a CD you bought.

You should also include the following information in your bug report. If you use the program reportbug to submit your report, this information will be included automatically.

flavor:        flavor of image you are using

architecture:  i386 
model:         your general hardware vendor and model
memory:        amount of RAM
scsi:          SCSI host adapter, if any
cd-rom:        CD-ROM model and interface type, e.g., ATAPI
network card:  network interface card, if any
pcmcia:        details of any PCMCIA devices

Depending on the nature of the bug, it also might be useful to report whether you are installing to IDE or SCSI disks, other peripheral devices such as audio, disk capacity, and the model of video card.

In the bug report, describe what the problem is, including the last visible kernel messages in the event of a kernel hang. Describe the steps that you did which brought the system into the problem state.