(Re-posting with shorter attachment to please the list gods. Sorry)

If there is such a deadline, why not consider to install first a woody (many
successes exist) then upgrading to sarge after ?

Ok... trying again with Leigh Brown's boot image and a woody root
floppy and a woody CD.

The console capture is below. Leigh's kernel boots up great, asks for
a root floppy and then ...

VFS: Insert root floppy and press ENTER

FAT: bogus logical sector size 1981
FAT: bogus logical sector size 1981
read_super_block: can't find a reiserfs filesystem on (dev 02:00,
block 64, size 1024)
read_super_block: can't find a reiserfs filesystem on (dev 02:00,
block 8, size 1024)
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 02:00

Reiserfs? Huh? I tried it twice, two different floppies. Both written
as follows (as suggested in Debian manual):
sudo dd if=root.bin of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 conv=sync ; sync
\1440+0 records in
1440+0 records out
1474560 bytes transferred in 120.042950 seconds (12284 bytes/sec)

I can however boot the installation I made earlier using Leigh's
image. I have completed the installation and it runs ... for a short
period of time. After about 5 minutes or so it stops responding to the
console and to pings.

MikeMartin