Hi,

I've downloaded slackware 12 and made 6 cds with nero by burning the image directly in windows xp. However, my first disk is not bootable. Would like to check if there's any additional steps that i need to take note of when burning first cd to make it bootable? Appreciate if someone can give me some pointers on this, thanks.

The first Slackware CD is bootable. The ISO image for this CD should be burnt to a CDROM - not as a file but as an image (forgive me if I don't know how Nero calls this).
You can check if you burnt correctly if you look at the contents of the burnt CDROM - if it contains the single file "slackware-12.0-install-d1.iso" then you burnt the image as a file - this is wrong. If the CDROM contains a whole lot of files and directories, then the burning went OK.

Now, if that CD won't boot on your computer, the computer suffers from the "incompatible because broken" BIOS syndrome. The Slackware 12.0 boot CD uses a bootloadsize of 32kB which causes problems for some computers with older BIOS. Previously, the bootloadsize was 4kB which worked better for older computers. The value of "32" is standards compliant, and may have been chosen because Slackware 12.0 is meant to be installed on modern computers...?
You can instead try to copy the USB boot image "usbboot.img" inside the "/usb-and-pxe-installers/" directory to a USB stick if your computer support booting from USB, or create your own compatible ISO image for the boot-CD using the instructions in "/isolinux/README.TXT"

Eric

Here is a nice little utility that can burn the CD ISO for you correctly.

Dennisk

I have had this problem before. I came across this little floppy image:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/

once you put it on a floppy and stick it in, it will enable you to boot off of your CD-ROM. I've used it for all kinds of systems, including installing windows from pressed CD's that wouldn't boot.

Screen shots are here:
http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/scrshots.html

I can't remember but I think I used rawrite to make the floppy, I think that comes on the Slackware CD. At least it came on the older versions, not sure about 12

Funny you mention Smart Boot Manager... it has lived in the /isolinux/sbootmgr/ directory of the Slackware CD's ever since Slackware 9.0... there is also a 'btmgr' package available in the /extra directory of the Slackware tree.
It is recommended by Slackware if you have problems booting the Slackware CD or DVD and have a floppy drive in your computer.

Eric

Maybe thats where I discovered it... I really can't remember.

Anyhow its a great utility if you can't get your distro to boot from CD.

if you are using nero select Nero burning rom (not Nero Express you can burn it by express too but select nero borning rom )go to file menu and and select burn as ISO image.you can check your your booting problem with other bootable cd and make sure booting is not the problem if you are not able to boot from other media you can go ahead to troubleshoot it.( First make sure you have made changes in BIOS ie. boot from cd-rom option )

Smart Boot Manager just saved me too. I was so confused when I couldn't use my version 11 boot disks to install version 12 (no 2.6 kernel); then I couldn't find the /bootdisk directory in the version 12 tree; then I found out the version 12 CD's should be bootable, but weren't working!

Thanks!

For any others that run into this problem, here is another option. I was unable to get the smart boot manager to boot the CD.

Mount the image, dump the contents to a directory and create a new image using a boot-load-size of 4. The options came from the README.TXT in the isolinux directory: