slackare install help
 

Hey everyone,

well, i've decided to install a copy of linux, and, by the advice of a few friends, chose slackware 9.0.

So i downloaded the ISO, made sure the checksum was right, burned it, and tried to boot off it. I got to the load kernel prompt, and after reading, typed bare.i and pressed enter. It then did a bunch of stuff, and then started listing off my IDE devices. It listed my HD, my DVD ROM(from which i was trying to install) my CDRW...and then stopped. I waited for a long time, but it didn't do anything. I then tried booting off a boot disk, but the same thing happened. I tried writing install.1 onto a floppy and putting it in after it stopeed, but nothing happenned. I even tried unplugging the cdrw (it detected it in the load even when i disabled it in the BIOS), but it just went to the DVD drive and then stopped.

Am I doing something wrong? What's the problem?

Thanks,
-fibbi

if slackware's not installed yet, just hit return at the boot: prompt. typing "bare.i root=/" etc. is to emergency boot your system when linux is already installed.

yeah, i've done both, and neither work. (btw, i wasn't typing bare.i root=/, just bare.i).

bare.i contains support for alot of drives but not all. try aztech.i, cd32a.i, cd535 .i or maybe isp16.i plug and play is 'off' in the bios?

yeah, i think it mentions some F keys to list other kernels you could try. sorry, i thought you were typing in the whole example line it gives. :D

The install CD doesn't include all of those kernels, but i've booted with most of the included ones (including old_cd.i which supposedly includes all the old proprietary drives, but my drive is a brand new sony, so i doubt that it needs a special driver).

I've tried with plug and play O/S both on and off in my BIOS to no avail.

Any other suggestions?

YAY! I fixed it!

Okay, so I played around with it for a while, not getting anywhere. Then I remembered that i'd installed redhat 9 a while back, and wondered if it used the same boot method. I found a redhat 9 bootdisk image, wrote it, booted...same thing.

Then I tried using the exact same CD i had previously used to install redhat. It had worked before, so now i thought i should give it a try.

No dice. Okay, so the problem must lie in something i've done to my system since June. The only hardware change that could possibly affect it was the addition of an audigy, so i popped that out, but it still wouldn't work.

Then I began to think about BIOS updates, and wondered if I should flash an old BIOS to see if that would work, but then I remembered that the new ASUS BIOSes had added a whole bunch of little tweaks lately (such as turbo mode), and wondered if there was anything like that for the IDE. Sure enough, I went into the BIOS and found "Enhanced IDE mode" on. Turned it off, and it booted like a charm.

Now that I've figured that out, is there somewhere i should go to report that the kernel chokes on Enhanced IDE mode? Or would a fix for this have already been built into the 2.6 kernel?