5.3-BETA5-i386-disc1 bootstrap failures

[Dan Strick]

Booting 3.5-BETA5-i386-disc2 in "safe mode" worked, but the system did
not seem to see my floppy disk drive and consequently I was unable to
copy my dmesg and pciconf output anywhere.  With some extra effort, I
might be able to transfer the stuff via a hard disk partition.

Is there any useful diagnostic information that I might produce for anyone?

Dan Strick
strick at covad.net

P.S. It would be convenient if /mnt2/rescue and such directories were
also in the fixit mode search path.  It would also be useful if there
were man pages available (on the disc2 "live filesystem").  I am not
yet familiar with release 5.x quirks and when my system is running
one of the 3.5-BETA5-i386 installation systems it can't be running
something else from which I could access the 5.x man pages.