I'm trying to install Slackware 8.1. I downloaded the iso from the sourceforge server. cksum says it is correct. I burned the CD with cdrecord on another Linux box and with Adaptec Easy CD Creator on a Windows box. Both CDs get the same results. The PC I'm installing on won't boot from the CD. It is an Emachines brand eTower 333k, 333mhz AMD-K6. I made the 6 floppies and the install seems to run fine until it is time to make the boot floppy. I get "ERROR: FLOPPY FORMAT FAILED" "The attempt to format the floppy disk in /dev/fd0 has failed, probably due to bad media. Please try again..." It gets this error very quickly; doesn't look like it tries to spin the floppy or even light up its LED. I bail out with the "Skip making boot disk" option and it asks about modems. I tell it I have no modem. That brings me to "WARNING: NO ROOT PASSWORD DETECTED" and asks me to set a root password. Selecting "yes" to set the password marches the texty/gui dialog box up the screen a few lines to make room for this error message:

chroot: cannnot execute /usr/bin/passwd: no such file or directory

Press [enter] to continue

On tty2 from cd / the command "find | grep passwd" returns two lines. It is in ./etc/passwd and ./usr/lib/setup/SeTpasswd, so it does appear to really not be there.

A look at tty4 shows the mke2fs output and it looks normal. When it probes for the CD install media it says "mount: /dev/hdd is not a valid block device" which is correct. The CD is on /dev/hdc, so this error doesn't worry me too much, but I'm not certain it is normal.

I went to tty2 and ran df -h. It says it is only using about 32MB of space. Even though I'm not installing X, KDE or Gnome, I think it should take more than that much to copy the other packages in. /usr/bin contains only zcat, a symlink to ../../bin/gzip. /bin contains more files, but no "passwd".

I think it is just failing to copy the files to the hard drive without complaining. I have tried two different hard drives so far.

Any ideas on where to look next would be appreciated.

Are you cdrom and hard drive on different IDE channels?

Yes. Harddrive is on /dev/hda primary ide controller channel 1. CD is on /dev/hdc secondary ide controller channel 1. Both are jumpered to master, no slave. Both have their own ribbon cable coming from the mobo.

Have you ever had problems installing things using this machine and this cdrom?

First, the install iso image requires 700 MByte CDR. A 650 MByte will not hold it. If yours is less, then I do not have any clue what you downloaded, but it wasn't a Slack install iso image.

During the install, switch to another console and use the "dmesg" command. Any errors reading the CD will be reported at the end of the output. Consider doing it just before you start to copy any packages to see what is out there to start with.

Make sure you created all your partitions as desired that you indicated during the beginning of the setup and format them all manually or let the setup program format them. You might want to try just using a single root partition for all and a swap file if the machines needs one. I format manually and I either have to create the devices manually for the new partitions (mknod) or reboot after creating the partitions so they will be made automagically by the kernel.

Also, for a full install on the machine you described I would expect it to take about 45 minutes or more. It will require a little more than 2 GByte storage space.

Perhaps it has been of some help to you.

Thanks, C++freak and Excalibur. Your questions and comments kept me thinking and trying. I finally figured out a way to skin this cat.

I tried to copy the cd to a partition on the hard drive with a view towards doing a hard drive install. It started out OK, but after I saw the "Input/Output" errors I think I was seeing what was troubling me all along. Not sure why it wouldn't copy from the CD to the hard drive. I'm guessing it is just crummy hardware. I originally bought that Emachines thing because it cost less than if I bought the components separately. I guess there's a reason for that.

Realizing that more hardware can solve many problems I put the CD in a different computer, plugged in a hard drive and copied it over with that PC. I put the hard drive I wanted to use in the emachine flunky box on hda with the drive that held the copy of the CD on hdb. I did "The Dance of the Six Floppies", mounted the hdb partition, and installed from the mounted directory. All is well. It's ready for me to tweak and twiddle.

Thanks!