I am trying to install Slackware 9.1 on an IBM eserver 220, it has an IDE CD and and Adaptec SCSI with 2 8GB Hard drives.

I can boot with the CD using th adaptec.s kernel which will find the hard drives (sda and sdb) and a Python tape drive, but Install then cannot find a source. Attempts to manually mount hda give the error "mount: not a directory". The CD is recognised as hda (it is on the master of the first IDE channel).

I installed an old Red Hat 7.3 on this machine without problems (apart from it sucking badly), and I have used the Slackware CD's on several other installs with no issues.

I could try via an NFS install, but would really appreciate any help with this issue. I have seen several other posts with similar problems that appear to revolve around SCSI systems.

TIA

Rob

what command are you using to mount?

I think that /cdrom is a symlink to /var/log/cdrom (?) so I have used "mount -t iso9660 -o ro /dev/hda /cdrom" I have tried creating new directories (like /newcd or /pleaseworkthistime) but no joy. During the install process I have seen the same error (mount: not a directory) on the syslog output (ALT F4).

I formatted one of the HD as a fat32 drive and was able to create a directory /win and mount it successfully, so the whole mount thing seems to work fine, just not with the CD.

Rob

copy the stuff from that cdrom to the hard drive. slackware will let you tell it where the packages are. the cdrom may be getting loaded as scd0 or similar.

/var/log/cdrom is then a link to some device. Do this to find out where the kernel sees it:
dmesg | less
then do:
ls -l /dev/cdrom
and ls -l whatever else follows from that.
it may help if you could put the CD drive on hdb.

First of all, thank you for the replies and help so far. I've found a solution - even though I'm not sure why!

I found a post of a similar nature in the RedHat forum, the cd wouldn't mount and failed with "mount: not a directory" The answer turned out to be disabling DMA on the drive.

I couldn't find any error message via dmesg, but running "hdparm /dev/hda" confirmed that dma was turned on for this drive. I ran "hdparm -d0 -X /dev/hda" disabled dma and the cd mounted with no problems.

Slack 9.1 installed and running!

Now I'll read up on how to disable dma on this drive (kernel parameter in lilo?) every boot.

Thanks again

Rob

it can be disabled for cdroms in the kernel config, for compiling a kernel.
otherwise, put the command in one of the startup scripts.