OK.. Slackware CD won't boot .. Now what?
 

OK.. I got the Slackware-8.1-iso CD image to download..

I made a CD .. The CD looks good. I can mount it.. all
of the files look OK, etc .. but it won't boot.

It's not the computer. It will boot fine from other
bootable CDs.

This was my first time making a bootable CD .. but there
really wasn't much of anything to do other than transfer
the downloaded CD image file to the CD. Right?

So, what did I do wrong?

Did you tell your burner software to Create CD From Disc Image ?

From the File Selection window, change File Type to ISO Image Files.

And be sure to check mark where it show to make Disc Bootable.

It depends what burning software you used that these will apply.

In testing my copy of the 8.1 ISO I had a problem getting it to boot in machines I knew had no problem with bootable cdroms. I think it may be a new boot method from the old el torito image style. It booted my laptop, one other crate, the P1s couldn't hack it.

There is still a bootdisk/rootdisk pair of folders in the top level of the CD. I've had to use these before for reallllly old machines. The instructions are in there using dd, I don't really trust rawrite and using DOS.

cheers,

Finegan

There are no options to "check" I am burning the downloaded
bootable image. All of these options should have been
specified when whoever make the image made it..

I don't see the machine being the problem. It WILL boot
other bootable CD with no problem. But is there something
unique about Slackware (Linux) bootable CDs? I have never
used them before.

I used xcdroast .. and just specified the Slackware iso image
and wrote the CD. Not really any options there. The CD will
mount fine and looks OK but it won't boot. By "won't boot" I
mean it just gets skipped over during the boot. It checks
the floppy.. then the CD ROM .. then goes on and boots from
the IDE hard disk.

I am trying to figure out what I did wrong. Any ideas?

Normally I would just use a boot/root floppy but I hate
the thought of having to boot from *five* root floppies now.
Why did they have to make it *five* ? I can see how stuff
grows.. so go from 1 to 2 maybe.. but FIVE? !! What's
it got? some kind of X graphical installer now? I hope not.

Absolutely nothing, I just had a PIII fail to boot the disk that my PII did, my PIII laptop did and my Athy 1.2 didn't in one of the drives, but did in the other :) . I guessed right, el torito is gone, check the changleog at slack and there's a brief explination as to what the new deal is.

5 root floppies? Gah!!! yeah that is insane. Journaling file system support? There's support for JFS and XFS in there too. Dunno...

Cheers,

Finegan

Well.. I never could get the ISO CD to boot. Tried the CD in two
other boxes that know how to boot from CD and it was ignored. So
for now, I decided to at least try a test install using the old
bootdisk approach.. but instead of trying to find 5 good floppy
disks to make all of the root disks, I tried using the install.zip
root image. It seemed to work (I think there is a tiny bug in the
documentation) but what really bothers me about this is why
should we be depending on using DOS file systems to load Slackware?

Something seems REALLY WRONG here having to depend on a DOS partition
in order to install Slackware! I may be taking things a bit extreme,
but I would much prefer an install method that has nothing to do with
DOS.. the O/S or the filesystem.

Anyway I did a dry-run of an 8.1 install .. booting from a floppy,
using the UMSDOS root partition (** ugh !!!) and the ISO CD
image for the packages. No surprises. Seems to work. Now I might
try it on on one of my real systems this weekend.

I would still like to know why the ISO CD won't boot.. but it's not
that big of a deal since I rarely do an install from a CD. Most of
my systems don't even have CD-ROM drives in them.

From what I was able to read within the files available, the Linux kernel has only two options for prompting for the root system diskettes, uncompressed image using any number of disks and compressed image limited to one disk. The new compressed image size will not fit on a single disk now.

I have had experiences even with the el torito boot CD with the new 80 minute CDR's not booting. The firmware in the drive doesn't mount it quick enough for the BIOS in the system. I stick with 74 minute/650 MByte for that reason. But the ISO image was 657 MB and wouldn't fit on any of mine. So I reauthored the CD stripping some things I didn't think I needed. Personally, I chose the new SPEAK kernel directories to elliminate. Please review the /isolinux/README.TXT file for the new process of using mkisofs.

I did not even think of the CD size.. I just used a regular
650 MB/74 minute CD. I guess I just assumed that the ISO image
would fit on a "STANDARD" CD. When I burned the CD, it did not give
any errors about stuff not fitting.

When the mirror sites FINALLY get updated properly, I am going to
download the new ISO image.. and the rest of the stuff that is missing.

I have yet to find a "mirror" site that has the complete 8.1 .. All that I
have tired are missing parts.

I believe you stated that you used XCDRoast. That is a GUI frontend for cdrecord at the console prompt. Cdrecord is what I used and it provided a warning but attempted the burn anyway and then failed at the end. I do not know how XCDRoast would report it if the burn failed. My CDR's had 335100 blocks reported available, about 2000 short if I recall. I did have a CDRW that it would fit on. But again, I have had problems on machines booting CDRW's like the 80 minute CDR's so I don't use them for this purpose. I have only booted the CD that I made on one machine, but it is an older Socket 7 type board from around three years ago.

To author my CD, I mounted the ISO image I download using loopback and copied everything using the "cp -a" command to another directory. Deleted what I didn't want. Then used the mkisofs command described in the README.TXT file from the /isolinux directory. Then burned the image created.

To mount the image under loopback use the following format:
mount -t iso9660 -o loop /path/iso_file_name /path/mount_point

To copy the files from the mount point directory use:
cp -a * /path/to_directory
(the -a sets the archive mode)

The mkisofs command is horrible. I put it in a shell script within the root directory of the CD layout. So I would only have to type it once. I could send it via email if you like.
Cheers!
James

Hi yall
Yesterday I had time to install 8.1 on my old IBM Thinkpad 380d. It booted and everything, all is well. The thing is that today I tried installing it in my PIII desktop and nothing the dammn thing wont boot up... Guess Ill have to use the diskettes or whatever. Hope you all have better luck.