4.8-Installation floppies fail

[taxman]

On Saturday 05 April 2003 03:19 am, Rob Lahaye wrote:
> Matthew Seaman wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 05, 2003 at 04:18:17PM +0900, Rob Lahaye wrote:
> >>Does the official release come with broken floppy files?
> >>Anything I can do to avoid this?
> >
> > No, but floppy disks are notoriously unreliable.  Sounds to me as if
> > your mfsroot floppy has got some bad sectors.  Could you try again,
> > making a new mfsroot floppy, preferably on a brand new never used
> > before floppy?
>
> Thanks; indeed that was the problem.
>
> I found out that I can check first whether my floppies
> are alright by
>    fdformat -f 1440 /dev/fd0
> on my other FreeBSD box. This program reports
> bad blocks on the floppy.
>
> I actually wonder if this should go in the installation
> manuals somewhere.

It's in there.  Section 2.2.7 Prepare the Boot Media says in part 2:
Prepare the Floppy Disks
Important: If you try to install FreeBSD and the installation program crashes, 
freezes, or otherwise misbehaves, one of the first things to suspect is the 
floppies. Try writing the floppy image files to some other disks and try 
again.

Other places are a bit more emphatic, the FAQ for one i believe.

Tim