help installing slackware 9.1 on freshly formatted drive

xbenx · 04-13-2004, 05:34 PM

Dear users,

I just got a Pentium Celeron 333MHz w/ 128MB SDRAM from my dad's work. He had Win98 on it, and I really wanted to try Slackware 9.1. I formatted the drive (its FAT32) and when I put in my CD it gave me a "Non-System Disk Error."

So I was wondering, how would I go about creating a bootdisk for SW 9.1?

Thanks for any / all your help!

blinux1 · 04-13-2004, 06:31 PM

did you have a floppy in when you rebooted?
Your CD should be bootable already, and make sure your system boots from the CD-ROM before booting from the Hard Drive. Are you sure you need to make a bootdisk?

michaelk · 04-13-2004, 07:38 PM

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

The Non-System Disk Error was due to the fact that you reformatted the drive and didn't copy the system files. Be sure to change the BIOS to boot from CD first. Slackware and most other linux distros uses a linux filesystem which is better than FAT32.

Once you get the CD booting and start the install process you will have the option to partition and format the disk. As a min you need two partitions, a /(root) and a swap partition. I would make swap 512MB.

xbenx · 04-13-2004, 10:24 PM

Alright...that was a lot of help. Now just to figure out how to boot from CD before HDD.

Thanks for the help!

nirvanix · 04-13-2004, 10:43 PM

You have to go into the computer BIOS to change the boot order. Shortly after the machine starts up you will have to press a key, probably either Del or F1 (should say somewhere on the screen). This will bring you into the BIOS. Go through the menu options until you find something about 'boot options' and make sure that cdrom is listed before any hard drive. Finally save the BIOS selections (pressing some key like F10) and you should be set. Good luck.

xbenx · 04-13-2004, 11:15 PM

Alright, so I got into my BIOS and changed the boot order to the following:

First Boot Device: ATAPI CD-ROM Drive
Second: Hard Drive
Third: Network Boot
Fourth: Removable Devices

Now, whenever I boot he PC up it just says "No Operating System Found." It's still not booting anything from the CD...

nirvanix · 04-14-2004, 10:53 AM

Well, all I can think of at the moment is that your Slackware CD is borked. Maybe try some other bootable CD (like Windoze) and see if that boots up. If it does, your Slackware CD is no good, and if it doesn't then your cdrom drive may be the issue.