OK. I've been using Slackware since 9.1, although I've gone a few months without using Linux here and there, because I use a lot of music editing/synth software for Windows, and dual-booting always seems to end badly for me. Anyway, I've just downloaded and burned Slackware 12, looking forward to seeing what it can do, after getting sick of Windows yet again (pulled out the WinXP hard drive and replaced it with a clean 40GB WD hard drive.)

Anyway, enough of that, I'm running a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz with 256 MB PC800 RAM (yeah, i could use more RAM, but hell, this is a machine that somebody threw away, and I salvaged and fixed, can't afford to buy more at the moment), with three graphics cards, two Geforce2 MX400 PCI cards with 64MB VRAM, and one Geforce2 MX400 AGP with 32MB VRAM. Sound Blaster 5.1 PCI sound card, and Netgear WG311T wifi card.

Anyway, I know my system is capable of booting from CD, I've done it with numerous other CD's (including the experimental AROS live-cd, Knoppix, and MiniPE-XT), I've installed every other version of linux i've used from CD (although they were on older systems, ranging from an old Pentium Pro to a P3-1GHz/512MB PC133) I've tried changing all the settings in the BIOS I could find, copying the .img file for a USB stick onto my 128MB USB stick and attempting to boot from that, taking out all the drives and changing master/slave settings repeatedly. (yes, it's all IDE, unfortunately I haven't upgraded to SATA yet.) Is there a certain way I need to burn the CD? I burned with Nero on Disc At Once mode, burned with Alcohol 120% and left the settings as they were, and nothing seems to work. Unfortunately this PC doesn't have the option to select a boot device by pressing a function key, only the priority menu in the BIOS.

Make sure you used the 'burn image' function. If you open the cd in windows explorer what files do you see on it?

Yeah, I used the burn image option.

i open it up in explorer and there are the folders:

isolinux kernels slackware

and the files

ANNOUNCE.12_0 BOOTING.TXT ChangeLog.txt CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT CHECKSUMS.md5 CHECKSUMS.md5.asc COPYING COPYRIGHT.TXT CRYPTO_NOTICE.TXT FAQ.TXT FILELIST.TXT GPG-KEY PACKAGES.TXT READ_D1.TXT README.TXT README_CRYPT.TXT README_LVM.TXT RELEASE_NOTES Slackware-HOWTO SPEAK_INSTALL.TXT SPEAKUP_DOCS.TXT UPGRADE.TXT

Did you check the MD5 sums of the CD after burning ?


Did you try that CD at someone else's comp?

Hi euthanazia,

Welcome to our group.

There are lots of things you can try.
If you have access to other computers just
try your disk in some more.

Does this computer have a floppy drive?
If so try sbootmgr. It has worked well for
me even in machines that do not normally
boot from CD. Unfortunately that project is
no longer maintained.

Best if you can is to burn a CD in Linux by
following the instructions in Slackware.

John

OK.. just tried on my laptop, even though i have a pretty ancient one (P3-600 256MB) but it's booting from my laptop just fine

Currently no other computers to install on, I've got a few more cases, processors, everything i need to build three or four more, problem is, no space to do it. Hell, the one I've got set up now takes up most of the 10x10 room I've got it in. And this is the fastest possible one I have. The rest are Pentium 3's/PC133 RAM and one Pentium 2, and no, I haven't had a floppy drive in a couple years.. I've got a couple old ones, but they're burned out.

OK, I'm about to try something different. After digging through my thousands of CD's scattered in several boxes around the room, I found my old Slackware 11 CD's.. I'm going to try and see if that boots, and if it does, maybe the old disc swap.. Only thing I can think of left to try at this point.

I'm not sure this is the problem you're having, but this thread might help you.
LQ : slackware-installation-40/cant-install-slackware-11-on-dell-dimension-4100-creepy-510648/

Regards,

You might want to burn the slackware cd with a different boot load size than standard. I think the slackware 12 cd is using -boot-load-size 32, in current it is back to 4, which fixed this kind of problem for me (the same cd booting on one computer, not on the other).

For more info and instructions how to make such a cd, see ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackwar...nux/README.TXT

Good luck!

Try to burn the CD at lower speed. My old box couldn't boot from CD burned at 16x or more. However, installing from CD burned at such low speed could take very long time.