SlackwareThis Forum is for the discussion of Slackware Linux.
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I'm putting Slack 9 on an old PII 350MHz box, and the installation keeps on failing on me.
I get as far as the part where you select the source media (and iso image I downloaded and burned to CD), then it says it's looking for the Slackware media, and then the installation totally hangs the box! (this happens whether I let it automatically find the CD or manually specify that it's it /dev/hdc )
I scolled back through the console log, and this is how the drive initializes -
I've tried turning off all advanced drive options (DMA etc) in the BIOS, but it makes no diff.
I tried the same CD in a new P4, did a full install and all was fine, so it's not the CD... Also decided to try using a Slack 8.1 CD (in the original PII box), and got the same prob!!
Any ideas?? Kinda tearing my hair out on this one..... Maybe I have to pass some extra parameters to the kernel?!
Any help / suggesions would be really cool.
P.S. - I know it's not just a straight prob of Linux not liking the CD drive, 'cos I can put RH8 on there with no probs.
Is it the ide cable? I'm presuming that since you're specifying hdc that you have your harddrive as 1:master and your cddrive as 2:master. Try swapping the cables over - if it's the cable, you should get harddrive errors. Alternatively, try putting your cddrive as 1:slave - it'll possibly take longer to install, but if it works...
Sometimes the installation will puke if you have the CD set to "cable select" I would make sure that the hard drive(s) are on IDE1 and that the CD is on IDE2 and set to master.
Nope, the CD was secondary master with all jumpers set correctly, put tried cabling it up and changing jumpers to make it primary slave, but still no joy - just does exactly the same (with the same errors as above).
Am still fairly sure that it's not a HW issue though, as I can still install RH8, with no errors at all. But I want Slackware on it instead!!
Does anyone know if theres any CD related parameters that I can pass to the kernel on boot, so that it detects it in a differnet way or something. I'm just guessing now, as I'm kinda out of ideas....
Installed by copying entire CD to a new partition (botted using tomsrtbt to do this - so the CD drive definately still works under Linux!!), and installing from that. All installs OK.
However, once I have my Slack system up and running, if I try to mount a CD (any CD!), it just totally hangs as before. And it's still doing exactly the same error messages at startup.
Not sure whether this does shed any more light on the problem, but this has really got me stumped!!
I've had this happen several times on different hardware, it's not distribution specific but rather has to do with the CD drive not liking the CD you burned. Some of the older CD drives and I've found some newer ones in HP E-PCs don't like homemade CDs. Not really much you can do about it other than what you already did.
Yes it is odd, but I would still look at it as a hardware (the CDRom drive). I've had problems with mounting CD and then it refusing to umount (this was on an HP ePC and the mount point wasn't in use), again not distro specific happened under RH, Slack, and Gentoo. How old is the drive? If you have another PC (like an M$ box) swap the CD drives and see if that fixes it.
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