Well, based on what I have read in the syslinux documentation, it's probably buggy BIOSes (the BIOS can only read certain dos based formats). Syslinux has some workarounds for such situations, such as memdisk, and some options. You'd have to experiment with modifying the boot disks with small syslinux config changes to find out for sure. Make sure you have the latest syslinux, too, so that you have the most recent improvements for buggy BIOSes: see syslinux home page at http://syslinux.zytor.com/ Quote from the syslinux site: "NEWS! SYSLINUX 1.76 was released on August 27, 2002; this version contains a workaround for certain broken Toshiba BIOSes." I know that RH uses syslinux on their boot disks, but don't know about Debian -- but you will be able to determine that easily enough (probably already know). LCR On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Cheryl Homiak wrote: > Well, it could be that the laptop floppy has a different > format; in fact, just this evening it was insisting I was > putting in some floppies with vfat. However, the Redhat > disks aren't working on either machine and they were done > on the desktop. so I don't think that's the problem with > the Redhat floppies. It might, however, explain why the > debian floppies, both standard and brltty-modified, work > on my desktop but not on my laptop. I'll go looking for > the disk utilities, as I do have a DOS partition. -- L. C. Robinson reply to no_spam+munged_lcr@onewest.net.invalid People buy MicroShaft for compatibility, but get incompatibility and instability instead. This is award winning "innovation". Find out how MS holds your data hostage with "The *Lens*"; see "CyberSnare" at http://www.netaction.org/msoft/cybersnare.html