OK here is the deal. I have Slakware Linux saved on my hard drive on my IBM running WindowsME I have another computer that I want to put slakware on. Here is the problem. I have all of slakware (on both computers) but it is not in an image(ISO) form, it has like a1, a2, a3... all of the way to the end y1.
Now I have on the Compaq computer a hard drive with WindowsME, and there I also have the saved slakware folders. Now how do I get all of that copiled and working on the Compaq's second hard drive?
Any help would be useful. Thanks in advance.

Right... So you have the sources on the Compaq box, and you need to install to the Compaq box yeah?

If this is the case then you will need to start off by creating two disks - I root disk and a boot disk. Have a look in the rootdsk and bootdsk.144 folders (I assume you have these). You use rawrite to create the disk, some something like

You can then boot from the two disks, once you are booted try mounting your Windows partition that holds the sources (assuming its the first partition on the first hard disk) with something like (the cdrom folder will already exist, so I'm being lazy and using it). If this works then you should be able to run and when it asks where to install from choose something like (clearly dependent on where you saved the sources].

Before you run setup you'll probably wanna use fdisk to partition your second hard disk. As a minimum you can get away with two partitions. A swap partition (if you need it) and a root partition - you wouldn't wanna take this approach on a 'real' system but if its a learning experience then it'll be fine.

You're other alternative is to download the ISOs or get a cheap copy of Slackware 7.1 from somewhere. If you do end up buying it then its worth waiting until the newer version is out, which should be soon...

HTH

Jamie...

Thank You JHarris
 

I thank you for such a quick reply. I think that might work. I have no experience doing it this way and Hope to get it going. I have the RedHat 7.0 disk laying around here(i dunno where!)and I have been wanting to learn about more than just RedHat. And Again I thank You JHarris

If it doesn't work post the errors - I might be able to help some more.

Not understanding something.
 

What is a good setup for a normal desktop user as far as partitions and so forth. I have learned everything up until now with relatively no help but there is a lot that I just don't know about. RedHat 7.0 set everything up for me. I have installed earlier versions but by following detailed instructions.
Now I am branching out and need to learn more for my sake to hopefully be able to use linux without windows at all. That is my goal. I have countless books that teach me medial stuff just aren't cutting it and the lack of friends that know what I am talking about is about nill.
Oh sorry got off track. I used the image files from RedHat 5.2 I dunno if that will work yet because I am presently not at my computer. I wonder if this will cause problems? I will let you know. I did get the computer to startup in linux and stored the rescue disk in ramdisk (it did it for me)Bash is staring me in the eye but I did get the dos partition loaded under /Dos the slakware folders are on c:
I did take WinME out completely and put the folders back on a dos partition along with corel wordperfect 2000 for linux. Now to get it all to work. Also as a side note I am downloading Mandrake and Caldera Linux. Any remarks, comments, hatreds?
Let me know.... Thanks

The general idea with partitioning is to seperate areas that might be filled up and give you problems. For example if you were running a 'real' system that you would definately have /home (or wherever else you keep your home dirs) on a seperate partition to allow you to use quotas and make sure that a user saving lots to their home dir won't fill up your root filesystem and stop the OS. In a similar fashion if you were running a system with a very high load (on the disk IO side) you may choose to have seperate partitions on seperate disk for things like groups of files servere, directories that are used for logging/spooling etc. This is why you often see /var put on its own partition. Logging is something often overlook when people design systems - if you have a program that logs every operation then if you leave your logs on a slow disk then the systems performanace will suffer.

As far as whats a good setup for 'normal' desktop users then I really believe it depends on your personal needs. The machine that I'm typing this on now has 4 linux partitions - its used to have 2 - / and some swap... I added more to gain more space but up until then things worked fine. The server that masquerades my LAN out onto the web has 6 - /, /tmp, /home, /iso, /usr/tmp, /melpomene. But these are all just for my need... /usr/tmp is probably going to get changed for /var/log soon as my logging sees to have become more substantial.

So I wouldn't really say there was an especially good setup, I think its generally advisable to have /home and /tmp on different partitions unless you are going to ensure you don't get carried away using disk space...

HTH - more opinion that fact though.

Jamie...

Everything worked
 

everything worked out great. Thanks for the help

I also installed Linux-Mandrake 8.0
It was easier than RedHat 7.2 and great to use I think I have found one to use on my desktop and game server...
Thanks for all of your help
Beano