I can't get Slackware on my laptop.
 

The other day, I got a distrobution of Slackware 9.1 for my laptop. (The laptop is a Toshiba Tecra 700CT with 120MHz Pentium, 32 MB of RAM, quad speed CDROM.) I can't boot from the CD, the BIOS doesn't support it. So I found bare.i, install.1, install.2, and I put them on floppy disks. They all booted up fine until I got to the part where I select the method to install Slackware. The only way I can is to use the CDROM, but when I have the floppy drive in the drive bay, it seems impossible! So I tried pulling out the floppy drive and inserted the CD drive (with Slackware in it) an scanned for the CDROM drive containing the disc. It didn't work. The error message says something about the boot disk not supporting the drive. Does that have anything to do with it?

How could I install this? Thanks in advance.

One thing you could try is installing a basic Linux installation on the laptop's hard drive, using floppies. As long as there is a root filesystem (with all the /etc, /usr, /home and other directories) and a boot image (/boot/bzImage or similar), you can make the hard drive bootable (using LILO), and then install from CDRom once it's booted up. My experience with it might give you some ideas; you could probably get away with installing a very minimal Slackware first, using only floppies, and then install the rest from CDRom.

nfs
 

i have an old toshiba satellite....75mhz, no cd rom, floppy, half gb hdd...the way i got slackware on there was just get bare.i, install.1, install.2, and the pcmcia disk. i did an NFS install. do what you have done, but run the pcmcia disk to detect the nic card, then just select NFS. either put the cd in another linux computer on your lan, or put the whole cd on the hdd of that computer and setup NFS on that computer. it was very neat, kind of like having a cd rom on the old laptop! hope that gives you a good idea.

I don't have a LAN:cry: If anything, I have a 128MB Compact Flash card that goes into a PCMCIA card reader... Could I load the files onto that an install?

I do have DOS drivers for my CDROM drive that I can install if I boot with a Windows 95 boot disk. Can I use this with any parts of Mini Slackware to recognise my CD? Then install the full version from there?

-It bites doing things with this laptop, if only the BIOs recognised CDs!!!

I do have the 1.2G that is partitioned in half with Windows 95 on one of the 2 partitions; is the a way to get Slackware installed on the other partition through Windows??

loadlin
 

you mentioned swapping from floppy to cdrom while doing the isntallation, i assume your drives are hot-swappable? if it is having a problem recognizing the cdrom then, try booting w/o a floppy from the loadlin instructions using your windows partition. check out the installation faq, question #11 (installing with no floppy drive) on the slackware web site.

another option might be the zipslack, depending on what you want to do. i am not sure how full-featured zipslack is, as i have never used it myself.

I took your advice and refered to question 11, and so far so good. I have my CD drivers installed and ready to go and everything. But, when I type in the code that he has supplied, the screen says "Image file missing" What is the image file and where can I find it?

Update: I was messing around with the command and got it to recognise the bootdisk that I installed on my harddrive. But I get a Kernel panic that says that it cant mount the rootdisk.
Like the FAQ said, I installed everything in a directory called "loadlin."
The files I used were the bzimage file and the color.gz file.

I came up with the command:

loadlin\loadlin loadlin\bzimage rw root=/dev/ram loadlin\initrd=color.gz load_ramdisk=1

It all goes fine until it tries to mount the root disk, where am I going wrong?

BTW: as it is booting, I see it recognise my CDROM drive, good news!

Now I got the code proper: loadlin\loadlin loadlin\bzimage root=/dev/ram rw initrd=loadlin\color.gz load_ramdisk=1

Color.gz has errors though, I cant get cfdisk and setup to run; everything else does.

Well, I got a good version of the root disk but the thing stopped recognising my disc drive. It recognised it once; but I don't know why the installer had to detect it again. I have to re-do everything. If only the disk has an installer like Windows...