here's the problem, I have the boot disking working fine, but whenever I RAWRITE color.gz for the Root disk I always get a bad sector on sector 1 of 18.
So when I try to use it I get a bunch of stuff, I get an error about the Kernel Panicing

which version are you installing?

hmm, says 9.0 Beta - I wanted 8.1...im gonna try that and see what happens

k, still wont work

Considered the possibilty of the floppy being
knackered? :)

Cheers,
Tink

I've tried 2 different floppies to no success

I am not sure why you are having the problems with writing the foppy disks. If is not the drive or the diskettes, then maybe the OS you are using to write it with. I saw another thread where they had to use a different program. There is also a RAWRITENT and RAWRITEXP versions of the file.

In addition, if you are not able to boot the CD for some reason, then you might be interested in the following program.

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

The boot manager can be written to a floppy disk and booted. It might allow you to boot the CD without all the floppy disks. They offer both a Linux and a DOS version. Of course if it is a bad disk drive then it will not help much either.

Cheers.

k, I tried the Root disk again and it says the it located it in sector 0 or something, but it just stays like that and doesn't do anything

You mentioned something about color.gz in your first post. It might be that you are following old instructions. For Slack 8.1 there is one boot disk, usually the bare.i kernel disk image, and then there are five root file system disks, install.1 ~ install.5. All total 6 diskettes.

There is a link for the name color.gz but it is a symlink to the isolinux/initrd.img file and it is 2.2 MB in size and will not fit on a 1.44 MB disk. Or at least that is what is on my copy of Slackware 8.1 that I think is just a mirror of the ftp site.

Perhaps this might help clear up something.

If you are just having trouble reading Color.gz try ungzipping it first then writting it to the floppy.(credits to http://www.utdallas.edu/~swadlow for this info) and the MCA project.

Be carfull with what you use though to do this i recommend www.7-zip.org .

If you are using windows for preps as in the slackware readme try a few different versions or rawrite or what ever its called
If you continue to get these errors, you have floppy disk problems, if you are certain you do not have floppy disk problems you have RAWWRITE problems.


9.0 beta ? are you a programmer? hmmm..

I did the install.1-5 and here's what it said after all disks were done:

EXT2-fs warning: checktime reched running e2fsck is reccomended
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem)
Freeing unused kernel memory: 104k freed
1: unaligned directory entry - offset=0, inode =2884, rec_len= 2885, name_len=0
EXT2-fs error (device ramdisk(1,0)): ext2_check_page: bad entry in directory #34
0: unaligned directory entry - offset=1024, inode=2884, rec_len=2885, name_len=0
Kernel panic: No init found. Try Passing init=option to kernel

what to do now?

OK, then you got a boot disk to boot a kernel and then prompt for the first of the five root disks. Each disk then in turn. However, when it completed loading the last root system disk; the root file system could not be mounted by the kernel to complete the load sequence.

I would conclude then bad floppy diskettes or a bad floppy disk drive. Suggest attempting to boot the diskettes on another machine to verify that they are actually working. I suspect they will not. But if they do, then it will eliminate the disks and the drive.

bad news for the moment is that I only have 1 machine to boot from (don't dare touch my good comp) so what I'm going to do is try and find a free disk drive from somewhere