The system I have that started the discussion of the boot sequence has no floppy drive at all. It's possible there is a traditional floppy controller and connector hidden somewhere on the board, but it was manufactured around 2004 or so and floppies were starting to fall out of favor by then. I can't imagine why they left out such a vital resource as one could have used it and around seventy-thousand floppy disks to back up the 70-gig hard drive in, let's see, about 48 days. The BIOS setup screen actually lists a Drive A but you'd have to probably find an IDE floppy drive to make it work. Fortunately, the boot sequence did not change on this system. I was just confused by the way the power-off sleep feature worked. As of last night, I was able to use the wheezy rescue disk to mount the hard drive so I could go in and edit the file names in /etc/rc2.d. Those are all the scripts that start important unix services such as cron and many others. There is a README file that tells you how to prevent a service from starting so I turned off bluetooth as there is no bluetooth controller, gdm3 as there is not a mouse present and I think maybe one more service. The system rebooted and speakup came right up each time. I now have a good command-line system with an accessible login prompt. It seems like I read that somebody got gnome to run with speakup, though. The goal is to be able to use it all. I would really like to get firefox working in gnome. Lots of other things are less hassle under the command line. Glenn writes: > I have never run into this as the boot setup by default. > Often the CD drive is third, and I change that to second, but I don't know > why a manufacturer would ship a computer with the floppy drive not the > first > boot device, unless a customer asks for that configuration. > Glenn
