Thought I would start a new thread with current info. I have an older laptop, HP pavilion, Athlon 1.4, 512 MB memory, CDRW/DVD. Charger - touchpap and modem are gone. Using an external hardware modem and USB Mouse. I want to dedicate this computer to my hobby and need Slackware to do it and it refuses to boot off the CD. To date I have updated the bios, tried SBM, Attempted to boot from a floppy made with RAWRITE, all 5 versions I have found (Returns error that kernel is bad.) Tried to bake an ext2 boot floppy but for some reason I cannot format the floppy under any distro I have tried, it is a HP (Sony) USB floppy and Knoppix sees it it just returns device not correctly defined. The HP boots from CD and runs ok on Knopix, Ubuntu, Mandriva and Debian. The Slackware cd booted fine on my Compaq laptop, installed just fine as dual boot. Anyway my last effort was to download an iso image of cd1 and it will not boot on the HP either. I really want slackware11 on the HP can anybody help?

Ken

Which kernel are you trying to use, or how far are you getting in the
boot process, any output at all? "it refuses to boot off the CD" isn't
really much to go buy in trying to help you.


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks for the reply Tink. The default kernel 2.4.33.3. As to what happens: Nothing, The HP splash appears, the CD spins and the boot message appears, the screen goes black and the HP splash screen appears and this is repeated over and over. until I stop it. I was finally able to create a bareacpi.i boot disk that will run, albeit very very slowly (10 minutes) now I am working on a root disk but little hope for this direction since I am hacing trouble with the Sony USB floppy. Funny that the floppy works ok in win..

You could try playing around with some of the less common kernel
boot options, like noapic ... my wives last machine wouldn't boot
slack either without that one until I compiled a custom kernel.

There's a few other candidates out there, google for kernel boot
parameters.


Cheers,
Tink

I give up, 100+ hours over three weeks and I'm no further than when I started. The Slackware CD will NOT work on my HP laptop and it seems nothing will make it work. I tried every image I could find, compiled kernels and wasted a number of disks. Beats me why every other distro I tried works. Something about the startup code on that distro causes a program halt - crash and reboot. And my Sony external floppy is hated by Linux - wonder waht it did? Thanks for helping me try.

Ken

I had a similar problem with an older Gateway- no matter how I configured things it seemed that I would never be able to install Slack 11.0 as it would never boot from the CD. Finally, in desperation, I went into BIOS setup and disabled video and BIOS cacheing (I believe- it's been awhile) and suddenly the sucker would boot from CD.

Don't ask, I have no idea.

I have a packard bell laptop, and I have to use the smart boot manager cd, then change to the slackware install cd, rescan all boot records, choose cd, and away you go.

Any time I have seen this it is a buggy bios that doesn't like isolinux.

Samac

try

boot: linux idebus=66