Hi,

I am trying to install slackware 10 from the iso's but have absolutely no experience with linux or unix so this is probably an embarrassingly stupid question.........

I've set up 2 partitions, 256M swap and the rest of the 20Gig hardrive as the main partition. I go through the setup program, and everything seems ok but when I try and set the source I select option 1 "install from slackware CD or DVD" and it says that it cant find a slackware disk. Can anyone enlighten me??

your CD image is bad

not necessarily. i had good slack 10 cds that did the same thing. try selecting the cdrom drive manually. also, what kind of cdrom drive do you have?

Thanks for responding so quick. Fraid I cant get the CDROM type info till tomorrow so I will post back then. I have tried manually specifying the drive but unfortunately I get the same result.

Just to highlight my ignorance even more though can either of you explain how I can go about checking my CD's? I've seen mention of MD5 or something similar which I think is there for just that reason? Also how can I get this far if there is a problem with my CDROM driver? I understand its using the simplest boot image but it is reading it from the cd in the first place?

Thanks again.

read this: http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/verifyiso.html

the reason i ask what kind of cdrom drive you're using is because if it's scsi, you have to enable it when you first boot.

Its an IDE CDROM. Thanks for the checksum info, I will check it out.

If you have *no* experience in Linux, I'm sure many would agree here, pick a more newbie-orientated Distro - like Mandrake, RedHat, Fedora or SuSe. When you get to grips with Linux, and feel you are more confident, then try a *harder* Linux distro - Slackware for example.

To put it simply, if you were learning to drive and seeked the most control over what you were doing, would you jump into a Ferrari, or start on a Ford Focus?

OK, so I was unable to check the MD5 of the iso as I had borrowed the iso on cd so i downloaded a fresh copy and that one checked out OK. I ran set up again and the same thing happened. I looked on some forums and found the dmesg comand and ran this:

dmesg | grep hd* (I'm not entirely sure what this means)

and I got a whole load of output the parts that seemed relevant to my CDROM (I was given it and I thought it was a cdrom!) drive were:
SAMSUNG SCR - 3232 ATAPI CD/DVD ROM drive
...
....
ATAPI 32X CD_ROM DRIVE 128 kb cache DMA
....
and at the end...

end request:I/O error dev 16:00 (hdc) sector 588

So is the problem driver related then?

In answer to your comments about slackware not being the best for a starter I was going for slackware as I believe it is the most like unix and I wanted to try and gain experience in this area. But maybe you are right its not going too well.....

hi there,

just how old is that cd-rom drive ? i have the experience that " old " drives
( say build 1998 and before ) have problems reading cd-r and -r/w.
i plugged in a much newer one to install Slack on an older pc.

And for your distro-choice... you couldn't do better.
Slackware's the best, also for learning.

egag

I had the exact same problem when installing slack10 on my server. It's the cdrom drive, I switched mine out and ran the install again without problems.

I appreciate those positive comments about the distro egag, I've got to say despite the problems I'm kind of enjoying this in a weird way. So I will get hold of a new CDROM and give it another go. I dont have a lot of free time at the moment so I probably wont have much time to do that for a few days, but I'm sure I'll be back with more questions then. With any luck they wont be about the install this time ;>)

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to reply and help me out.