I'm trying to install slack 9 on one of my other machines. It currently has red hat 8 on it. This isn't a dual boot situation. I'm gonna reformat and repartition and all that for a fresh clean install of slack. It's an AMD K6-2 350Mhz machine with 128MB memory and a TNT2 64MB AGP video card with a 6GB HD and and a 40x CD-ROM drive. The CD is the official, purchased CD1 of the 4 CD set. I have slack 9 installed on another machine also.

I have Plug-n-Pray disable in the BIOS. The CD-ROM is set as the first bootable device.

I put the CD in the drive and push the reset button and it goes through all of the usual BIOS stuff and then it gets to the part that says:

Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM:

Then it says:

ISOLINUX 2.01 2003-10-31 _

and there it sits.

Any ideas what's up with that? Is there some sort of gremlin in there that doesn't agree with that old AMD, maybe. Maybe it's a boot loader, lilo, mammerjammer thing? But, I'm gonna be completely formatting in the new install. Maybe I need to throw in my Win98 boot disk, fdisk /mbr, delete partitions, reformat... dang, I hope not.


Thanks...

Hmmm... the plot thickens. The Red Hat 8 CD won't boot now. My Win98 CD won't boot. Time to get out the screw driver.

I was able to boot and install Red Hat 8 on that machine just a couple of weeks ago.

I'll bet the cats sabatoged that machine....

Maybe you can try booting from one of the booty disks available on all the mirrors (get like the bare.i one or summin'). See if it works that way, 'cause then at least you'll have it up and running.

But yeah... I realize that's a sucky solution.



-zsejk

Yeah, that's on my list. I can create a bootdisk from one of the CD's.

In the mean time I booted (that's a weird word) with my Win98 boot floppy and ran fdisk /mbr. That didn't do any good. I reset the BIOS to plug-and-play and tried to boot with the Win98 CD. That didn't work. I took the thing apart, diconnected to two old drives on IDE2 and hooked the CD up to that and set it as Master. Still no boot from CD. Remembered to go back and set plug-and-play to no, that didn't work.
And I just installed red hat 8 on that machine not long ago. I'm stumped.

Maybe that drive is going south. Although, if I boot to the Win98 floppy I can view the contents of the CDs.

Cute Apple solution: hold down the C key while the computer is booting. Though I am *quite* sure that doesn't work on non-Apple machines. But hey... it's worth a try right?



-zsejk

Hi,
It might help if you reset the CMOS. You have probably already done this, but I did not see it mentioned in your posts.

What do you mean 'reset the CMOS'? Are you talking about going back into the BIOS and reloading the 'default' configuration? Actually, I hadn't thought about that since the current setup worked with red hat 8. I just made a bootdisk and the install.1 and install.2 disks, but I think I might go back and try resetting the BIOS configuration to the default load before proceeding.

Or, what's the other thing, pull out the battery for a few hours??

Edit: Actually, I shouldn't have to do any of that, I would think. But, you never know.

I agree that you should not have to reset the CMOS. It was just an idea. Not even one of my better ideas. On the other hand, sometimes it does help.
You can remove the CMOS battery for a few minutes, OR, on my old motherboards, there is a CMOS jumper that is usually on pins 2 and 3.
Putting it on pins 1 and 2 for about 30 seconds will reset the CMOS.
You would have to look at your motherboard or booklet for the right pins for you, of course.

I didn't find a CMOS jumper on that old P5MVP-B4 motherboard and nothing else allowed me to boot from that CD-ROM drive, so I just went and used the ol' boot floppy, root floppy method, and then was able to do the install from the CD.

That old Win98 boot floppy sure comes in handy a lot.

Modern techonolgy- a mind bogglin' thang.

Okay, I confess that I have used the Win98 boot floppy in the past. I will also confess that it and <fdisk /mbr> have probably solved some difficult problems.
I do not think we are supposed to admit it.
Glad you got it going.