To use the custom boot disk, just stick it in the drive and reboot. But I don't think it'll make your probing problems go away. The installation kernels seem to probe for just about every cdrom drive known on heaven and earth, and ditto for network cards. But that's how it should be, because it has to cater for the maximum number of cases.
Count yourself fortunate - my DEPCA card is completely dead after all that probing, and has to be powered off before it'll work again with DOS. Luckily I decided to keep all the .deb files when I installed another machine, so I'm using a zip drive to install from. If you have the room, it's certainly a good idea to keep the .deb files to start with. Moving them out of /var/lib/dpkg/methods/ftp... will stop all the interminable checking, but it means you can reinstall things from a mounted disk if you screw up in dselect. dselect takes some getting used to, but I've found that a bit of repetition often works. I tend to let it choose the default system, screw up, then I repeat it once, which solves most things, then I select one thing at a time where it can't sort itself out. You'll especially thank yourself for keeping the .deb files if you manage to break dpkg-ftp as I did once! -- David Wright, Open University, Earth Science Department, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA U.K. email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel: +44 1908 653 739 fax: +44 1908 655 151 -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
