Why won't Slackware 7.1 lowmem.i boot, every other disk / version will?

SBing · 08-01-2004, 02:59 AM

I just recieve the machine's: "Operating system not found"

All the other lowmem.i versions work fine, just 7.1 refuses to boot. I've created it in the same way,

$ dd if=lowmem.i of=/dev/fd0

And while 7.1's bare.i and bareacm.i boot, I can't run any programs

What am I doing wrong?

RobertP · 08-01-2004, 09:06 AM

It seems you have a bad image. Have you tried other mirrors? You might also check the md5sum.

CHECKSUMS.md5

Why are you using lowmem?

Did you get the installer disks and network disks from rootdisks?

Do you need to use 7.1? I can install 10 on very small machines.

SBing · 08-01-2004, 09:57 AM

Quote:

It seems you have a bad image. Have you tried other mirrors? You might also check the md5sum.

Yeh, I have tried different mirrors, though I don't have the MD5SUM for lowmem.i. The link you provided is for 8.1 - I haven't seen /slackware-7.1/CHECKSUMS.md5 before

Quote:

Why are you using lowmem?

Because I have a low amount of memory - 8MB

Quote:

Did you get the installer disks and network disks from rootdisks?

Yeh, color.gz, pcmcia.dsk and network.dsk

Quote:

Do you need to use 7.1? I can install 10 on very small machines.

No CD-ROM, otherwise I'd use 10.0 straight away - I just did on another oldish laptop.

From what I have seen, 7.1 was the last one to provide floppy installs. I'm going to start a new thread to get some help on installing on this laptop.

Cheers :)

RobertP · 08-01-2004, 11:22 AM

You can boot from floppy and do the install over the network from an NFS site. You can do that even with 10. I have not done that in less than 32 mB, though. The slackware.com website mentions it briefly in the book .

There is more detail in Slackware-HOWTO

about installing in low memory.

I do not know of an NFS site on the www for Slackware, so you may need to set up a second Linux box as server.

This article may be useful.

Cedrik · 08-01-2004, 11:32 AM

I would think that you have to syslinux -s /dev/fd0 before use the dd command