Ok, I fixed the hda thing & booting was working. Then it ask me for "root floppy". How do I make a root floppy?? I can't figure it out on slackware's help or installation page. Sorry for all the stupid questions. I may just need to purchase a cd set that installs it all for me. I want to put linux on my second partition. The first is reserved for Win98SE that I won't give up. Thanks for the help.

If you have the Slackware disks, fire up win98, put in the first disk,
and browse to the rootdisks folder.
Double click "rawwrite.exe"
You will get a "dos prompt" that will ask you for an image.
Type in "install.1"
It will then ask for a destination. Type "a:" (all this without the quotes of course)
When it finishes, do it again for "install.2"

There you have it.

I am installing Slackware with the files I downloaded. I unzipped zipslack to my second partition & made a boot floppy. Then I changed it to hda2. When booting off the floppy it tells me it needs floppy boot. I can't find image.1 or the rest in the folders. If I had DSL & a CD-RW, I would download the big install & burn a CD. Trying to do this with a simple 48000bps dial-up. Sorry for all the trouble.

I see.
If you unzipped ZipSlack to your second partition (d) you should
be able to boot into Dos, cd to d:, then type "dir" (no quotes of course).
There should be a directory called "\LINUX". Cd to that dir. and type "LINUX"

Tried that. Ended up right back in the linux folder. The lines showed something reading hdb2, 3 ect.. I can't figure out which file has that. Where could I find the other files to edit?? Thanks.

PS the folder is on drive e:. d: is my old drive that I use for storage. That drive isn't touched, when I get a nasty.

Here are the Zipslack booting instructions:
http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/booting.php

...edit the LINUX.BAT file, and make sure the root=/dev/XXXX statement on the loadlin line (the one that's not commented out with 'rem') is set up to use the partition where you unzipped ZIPSLACK.ZIP...
is the important part.
You will need to use the correct Linux designation for your "drive E:".
Boot into real DOS (not a DOS box in Wndows) and you should be good.

Using the Zipslack boot floppy (I am looking at my 9.0 Zipslack boot floppy) you would type:
mount root=/dev/xxxx rw
at the prompt. The "xxxx" being the correct drive designation.

Your losing me here.
Where exactly did you extract zipslack to?

Primary Master is hda.
If there's 2 partitions on it, they are:

hda1 and hda2

Primary Slave is hdb.
And so on...

You need to edit the LINUX.BAT on the line for loadlin.
It needs to be:

root=/dev/hda1 (or hda2, or hdb1, or where ever you extracted zipslack)

I have my primary drive set up with 4 partitions, so that would be hda1, hda2, hda3 & hda4. I also have my old, small drive attached, so it is drive d:. That make my other 3 on my main drive, e, f & g. I have zipslack unzipped on drive e: which should be hda2. I have edited linux.bat to hda2 & that seemed to be working, but some file in the \linux folder still has the others (hda5, 6 ect.) in it. It ends up back to the e:\linux dos prompt. Sorry for the trouble.

That depends on if you have an extended partition containing logical partitions or all primary partitions.
If the partitions are all primary then the designations are as you list them. If there is an extended partition then the extended partition also counts as a drive moving the drive designations in it up one.
Since you do not already have Linux running on your computer, the easiest way to confirm your drive designations would be with Tom's boot disk. It can be created in Windows. After booting it you can run the Linux fdisk ( `fdisk -l` ) to list your partitions.
Just to check on things you are probably already doing. You should use /dev/hda2 not just hda2. Zipslack was unzipped into the root of the partition and not in a subfolder. It created it's own \linux folder when unzipped.

Sorry to be so long. Since I know MikeySoft Win so well, I'm the local guru (fix-it man). I did fdisk & it showed the drive I needed was hda5. C: is 1 & 2, my old drive in D: is 3 & 4, therefore the other 3 drives are 5, 6 & 7. I changed everything on my zipslack bootdisk & in E:\Linux\ . On start from linux folder, I get the kernel panic message. When I booted from the floppy I logged in as 'root'. It brought me to: 'root@zipslack:~#' . What do I do there? I typed help, but shit flashed by to fast, even for a speed reader. Hopefully this is an easy problem. Thanks for the help.