I have read the instructions carefully in the debian installation manual. I have created a rescue floppy from the rescue.bin image. I have also created a floppy from the root.bin image. I insert the rescue floppy start the computer and at the boot: prompt I press enter. It all starts up like it should. After a few seconds it asks for the root floppy. I insert it and press enter. It seems to go fine first but it ends up in I/O errors: Invalid compressed format (err=1) <6>apm: BIOS not found. Does anyone knows what could cause this?

Have you disabled (or, possibly, not enabled) any power-saving features in your BIOS?

If nothing else, you can boot with "linux apm=off" to disable APM.

did you re-write the root disk? it looks corrupted...