Hello all!

I am a newbie trying to install slackware on my old Pentium MMX PC(64MB and 4GB HDD). I get the following error when booting the install CD:

ISOLINUX 2.13 2004-12-14 isolinux: Loading spec packet failed, trying to wing it
...
isolinux: Found something at drive = FF
isolinux: Looks like it might be right, continuing
isolinux: Disk error 01, AX=42E5, drive FF
Boot failed: press a key to retry...

I have tried booting the CD on another PC and i was able to see the boot prompt.

Any tips or maybe some helpful links to similar problems.

Thank you very much.

Well ... it looks to me like a faulty or incompatible drive. If it was me I'd slap a different drive in there for a try.

I replaced my drive with this new Lite-on DVDRW-CDRW, and i still get this similar messsage:

ISOLINUX 2.13 2004-12-14 isolinux: Loading spec packet failed, trying to wing it
...
isolinux: Found something at drive = FF
isolinux: Looks like it might be right, continuing
isolinux: Disk error 01, AX=4224, drive FF
Boot failed: press a key to retry...

You got farther than I did.

I tried to install Slack 11 on a 1999-vintage eMachine and the PC wouldn't even acknowledge that there was a CD in the drive! Burned another CD with an image from a different mirror (just in case), and the same thing happened. I finally gave up and installed Slack 10.2, which installed perfectly. The Slack 11 CD was mountable and readable both from this PC with 10.2 and from the PC that it was originally burned from, which was running Fedora 5.

This eMachine was able to see and boot Ubuntu 6.10, Debian Etch, PCLinuxOS 0.93, and Damn Small Linux 3.2 disks burned on the same Fedora machine, so I don't think the CD burner is an issue. But I have a specific purpose for this box, so I need to use Slackware on it.

I've read several reports about Slack 11 not being able to install on PCs with older BIOSes - something about how the original ISO image was created being different with this version (mkisofs parameter, IIRC).

Since Slackware is one of the few remaining distros that will run properly on old hardware, this is a serious problem. For this reason, I can't recommend Slack 11, although 10.2 still works perfectly. If a CD can't boot or even be recognized, what good is it?

I had the same problem, KeithE. I used sbootmgr.dsk. sbootmgr is a program that you put on a floppy(you can just copy it), it acts like a boot manager and you can tell it to boot the CD. I had to use it when installing Slackware 11.0 and it worked very well for me. Make sure you read the README.TXT that come with sbootmgr.dsk

I am not quite sure if this will help you in your situation rasputin_ylong, but I think it is worth a shot. Here is the linuxquestions.org thread that helped me. I hope this help

I tried sbootmgr and it still didn't work, although I may have done something wrong. But that Slack 11 CD did boot in the PC that I burned it on (a 1.1 GHz AMD Athlon running Fedora 5), which has a BIOS dated 2002.

Oh, well. Back to Slack 10.2 on that eMachine. There really are very few differences between it and Slack 11 anyway (a newer KDE being the most significant).

I've already installed slackware 10.2, been running it for 1 day now . I created the Sbootmgr.dsk diskette, works fine when I installed Ubuntu and for trying out Live CDs using the original CDROM drive I had. It just took time to update this thread.