Installing Slackware 10 from floppy disk
 

Hello.

I wish to install Slackware 10 on an old Pentium 166mhz with 18mb of RAM and a 8gb HD.
The machine doesn't support booting from the cdrom drive so I built the boot and rootdisks to install it from the floppy. Everytime I try to boot the machine from the bootdisk there is an error: "Boot failed".
I created several bootdisks under Windows XP and DOS, I even changed the floppy drive (to another a friend of mine gave me) but I was never able to boot from the floppy. I either get the "Boot failed" error or it tries to boot from the HD.

I searched the web and looked for a solution in "Slackware Linux Essentials" but... nothing so far.
Can anyone give me a clue of what the problem is?

Thanks.

I also just installed Slack 10 on a 166 system, and found that the floppy-boot idea doesn't work either (just errors after the 2nd disk (install.1 ?) was inserted.) What I did was to put the HD into a system that would boot the CD and install there, then move the HD back into the target system.

Sorry I wasn't much help. Good luck.

Kev.

did you make the floppy's with ' rawwrite ' ?
some people just copy " bare.i " to a floppy and that doesn't work....

egag

I vaguely remember having trouble with this. I think I was using NT4, which was bleeding edge at the time... I found that there were significant differences in the various rawrites that are included. Be sure to try rawritexp.exe or rawritent.exe. That may be the source of your problems.

Kudos on resurrecting an older machine!

I created the disks using rawrite, i didn't copy bare.i :-)

Under xp, I tried using rawritexp.exe, rawritent.exe and rawrite.exe (command line).
I even booted the system using a dos disk and then created the slack bootdisks using rawrite.exe.
If my memory doesn't fail me I think there was also some strange errors using command line rawrite...

I got always the "Boot failed" when I trying the bootdisk in the old machine!

I followed Kevin's suggestion... I put the hd in another machine and installed from the cd.

Anyway... the main problem is solved.
Thanks to all.

ok. :)
Slackware up and running.

see you back on this forum.....

egag