Just to let Jude, and everybody else who has followed this, know: I reseated my floppy drive and all my floppies, including the one that wouldn't mount last night, are fine. so while the predictions of gloom and doom could have been correct, I'm really glad they aren't. that doesn't totally rule out the idea that the formatting on the two machines is different, somewhat like the alignment of four-track tape recorders from NLS was sometimes different a few years back. However, I have compiled kernels for the laptop on the desktop and, to test them before putting them on the laptop permanently, have booted from the floppy made on the desktop. so i don't think this is the cause of my brltty/redhat disks problem. the one thing i haven't tried yet is just running the unmodified RH boot.img; I wouldn't be able to read it but I could tell by the sounds if it seemed to work. Actually, maybe i could get some info if I put the serial line in. I do think the need for the dd label is probably part of the issue, but still am a bit puzzled as to why vmlinuz is apparently not being found. Cheryl