From the begining.....

I had Redhat 7.3 installed and running perfectly, I decided I wanted to move on to bigger and better things. I DL Slackware 9 iso and burn it to disk. Set machine up to boot from CD. Apon boot I get.....

Invalid compresses format (err=2)
system halted

I tried various commands all ending with the same result. Ok I must have a corrupted iso or bad burn. I DL from another mirror, burn it, all the same results. I've tried making different boot floppies with the same end. Now I think Slack don't like me, so I try Debian(woody) I get the same results. All this brings me to think I have a problem with my burner, so I went down to the local computer store and bought a Slackware 9.0 4CD set......Guess what.......same problem.

Anyone have any ideas?

Most likely your CD-ROM/CD-RW drive. A tip that might work (although this is primarily hard disk specific) check the jumper on your CD drive, make sure it's set to master or slave accordingly (not sure if your CD drive has a CABLE SELECT jumper setting, but avoid setting it so).

The CD-RW drive used to burn the ISO's is in a Windoze box, thought it might be the problem, but every other CD I burn with it, music or data works fine. I thought the CD-ROM in the Redhat box may be the problem, but I've used three different ones.

I looked at the jumpers, all are set correctly. All drives are detected by BIOS correctly.

I need to access some data on hdc, I guess I'll have to go back to RH......Unless they are any other ideas.....

It seems as if the problem was either BIOS or Motherboard incompatibility(I think motherboard, tried every BIOS setting possible). I removed the Epox board and 1.1Ghz T-bird, installed a FIC board and K6-2 450 and all works fine. A little slow but fine all the same.