I have an old Toshiba Laptop, and am trying to get Slackware 10 on it.

The problem is that the CDROM drive on the laptop is kindof fritzy. It may work sometimes and other times it won't. So in the standard slackware install, it will fail on multiple packages, which I know aren't corrupted, because if I re install, other packages will fail, it's never the same ones...

Regardless, what are some ideas for getting the slackware onto my laptop?

Can I make a partition and copy data over and do it that way? I tried to do that, but it didn't seem to work.

Could it be installed over a network connection?

Yes. Do you have a network card in the laptop?

Alternatively, do you have a USB connector on the laptop. You can attach external drive\enclosure to it.

just a suggestion, try doing a minimal install, then just install the rest when you have the base system running

Is it aright if i add to this post?

I'm in the same boat as CaryFitzHugh, I have a Sony picture book c1x , which at the time i bought it, they came with usb boot-able floppy drives and without cd-rom drives, in my quest to get some type of *nix OS on to this machine, about 2 months ago, I found out that mandrake 8.2 came with a usb boot disk, when booted from a floppy drive it loads usb modules, for usb cd-rom drives and usb-networking devices, so I boot from this boot-disk, then once the boot was done and the install menu was load, i unplugged the floppy drive from the only usb port on this laptop, and plugged up a external iomega usb-cdrw-rom drive, and the installer detected this cd-rom drive, and I successfully installed the OS from the dristo CDs.

Finally I got a nix OS on my mini laptop, the only problem is it's the big and slow, bogged down out dated mandrake 8.2 with the 2.4.18 kernel

So now that i know it's possible to install linux on this laptop, I'm trying to get slack to install on it. but I have on ideal how to do this?
Can slack be installed from an existing file system? If so, then how ?
I figured if it can be installed from an existing file system, maybe CaryFitzHugh can take advantage of this also

It can be installed from an existing file system, and also using the same boot floopy that you used.

how can it be installed using the mandrake 8.2. boot disk? will it have to be modified some how?

I have a PCMCIA NIC card on it.

What's the method for doing a HDD install?
I booted with the CD.
Made 3 partitions, swap, and two others.
and copied all the data on the two CDs to that partition.

Then rebooted, and tried to install with setup and using a partition, but it couldn't find all of the slackware files....

If you have a network adapter (Ethernet) for your laptop you can do an NFS install. Copy Slackware to a directory on the harddisc of a second computer, export this directory via NFS and mount it on your laptop
- either prior to starting setup. In this case you choose "install from a pre-mounted directory".
- or you start setup first, and specify the NFS mount when asked for it.

It's been a while since I did this myself on my Pentium 120 Classic laptop, so the information may not be quite correct. But it's not a problem: Just follow the on-screen instructions. It works, and it is not difficult! (Although I tend to put typos into path names when specifying the NFS mount...).

Before that you might want to read the sections on NFS in http://www.slackware.com/book/ and have a look at http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq....=installation.

Good luck!

gargamel

How is it possible to use the same mandrake usb boot disk, to install slackware 10?

There might be a misunderstanding. I guess what gbonvehi meant is that you can use the same *Slackware* boot disk, regardless of your installation method, no matter if you do a network or cdrom install. Of course, you'll have to create that bootdisk first. Which is easy: Just copy the boot disk image that best fits your needs from the directory bootdisks on the Slackware CDs onto a floppy disk with the dd command.

You may be able to use your Mandrake boot disk for booting your Slackware system once it is installed, but I don't think that you can use it for installation.

gargamel