Hello all,

I am unable to get slack 8.1 installed on my system and really need some help.

For starters, my server I want to install it on has a very old supermicro motherboard that for some reason cannot boot the new syslinux format slack 8.1 uses.

So, I read all the threads about that, and most of the suggestions told me to install from floppies. So, I dilligently made all 6 floppies (bare.i and all 5 rootdisks) and started the boot process.

All seemed to be going fine, but just after it finishes loading the 5th rootdisk into the ramdisk, it dies and gives me the following error:

"init: error while loading shared libraries: E: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!"

My only thoughts on this is that my hard drive is not connected to the motherboard, but instead to a Promise Ultra-66 PCI card. Would that affect this? And if so, how do I tell the boot disk to look at the corerct drive?

Please help, I really want to get this installed..... are there other options I could use other than the CD and floppy disk method?

Thanks!

-- Marshall

Nah, not the harddrive, because that's exactly how I installed, same card, uses the hpt374 chipset that's part of the bare.i kernel. My machine's BIOS didn't support 20Gb+ drives and I was putting in a 60. Good little card.

Are you certain all of the floppies dd'd correctly? Right number of records in and out?

Remember, it could be worse, it used to take about 40 floppies to install Slack back in the day.

Cheers,

Finegan

That very likely could be part of the problem, but I did try recreating the disks a second time because I thought the same thing.. But the instructions I saw to create the floppies on the slack 8.1 CD said to do this:

cat install.1 > /dev/fd0

so I didn't actually use dd to create any of these disks like I used to. Should I try the old dd method...?

I also looked into this more and found another method on the slack 8.1 cd in the install.zip.README. It says it will work for people who have no bootable CD or floppy. Basically boots the images off of a fat partition.

I will try that and see how it works.....

I didn't bother to read the README, just dd'd 'em like I always have, worked fine.

Cheers,

Finegan

Smart Boot Manager can be installed to a floppy disk and allow the ISOLINUX system to be booted from the CD.

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net

Avoids creating all the disks and the boot manager disk can be used for many different machines.

YEAH!! I finally got it working, now I can party like a rock star with my new, rock-solid Slack 8.1 box!!

Thanks all of you for giving me such good suggestions, I really do love this about the linux community.

I tried everyone's ideas, and it seems that my old server is just too darned old to work with most of the suggestions.

What I finally did to get this to work is follow these instructions on the slackware cd:

ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackwar...all.zip.README

Basically had to create a Fat partition, install all the install files on there (using dos or windows or something...) and then boot the install process using
loadlin.

Kinda strange, but it worked, so I'm happy.

Thanks again!