Reading that error message suggests to me that either you have a failing floppy drive or that you have a corrupt copy of the root disk. The first thing I'd try is rewriting the root disk on a different floppy. The fact that it took a long time to come up talking also makes me wonder about that floppy drive. I know I recently had to replace a floppy drive because it absolutely refused to format floppies and attempts to create disks with Rawrite always resulted in corrupt disks. After replacing the drive, the problems went away. Good luck.
