Thanks to this thread, I can now put to rest the idea of using ANY Slackware version 11 iso image for installing Slackware 11 on our Dell 4100.

I tried 3 different CD's, two from different CD manufacturers, and all from different mirrors. Then i got 'smart" and swapped out the CDROM and placed in a NEC DVD burner (with a new IDE cable) all to no avail. It still didn't work!

Then I googled and found this thread.

Now I can go to sleep tonight.

I'd like to add my voice to this thread; I'm having the same problem installing Slack 11 on my Dimension 4100. I'm no stranger to burning ISOs or installing Linux distros on this and other machines, and the md5 checks out fine. Other live cd's like Ubuntu boot fine. But my Dell completely ignores the Slackware disk and loads from the hard drive.

Anyone know of a step by step install guide for slackware for this case(Like no using cdrom) I cant seem to find one. BTW .. I got debian installed on the same computer (with 2nd hdd for slack) could this help things? (please link me to step by step things)

mc_03,

Would _you_ tell us what mirror you got the iso from?
None of the other guys with this problem seem to want
to do that. Also, just for clarity, would you reply
and agree if this _exactly_ describes the problem:

1) Your Dell 4100 can boot some other bootable disk.
2) The Dell 4100 will not boot the first Slackware install disk.
3) This same Slackware install disk will boot on some other computer.

A one simple request and one simple question..will you reply?
I would like to download the same iso myself and try it.

Regards,
--Lawrence

1) Your Dell 4100 can boot some other bootable disk. Yes. every other i have tried (Ubuntu, Mandrake, Debian, LFS,Gentoo
)
2) The Dell 4100 will not boot the first Slackware install disk.true, this is the only disk i cannot get it to boot with (none of them boot, but i wanna use slackware really bad)


3) This same Slackware install disk will boot on some other computer.yes all of them will boot on diffrent computers (Laptop, school computers)

I even went as far as geting a CD from a vendor, with the same results.

DemetriusCrisco,

If you can read the slackware install disk from your Debian
installation, there is an old procedure for installing from a hard
drive that might work...its been a long,long time since anyone I know
has done this, but if it does work,it will be much faster than a nfs
install. I'll look through some of my old Linux manuals, but first,
can you copy files from the Slackware cd to a directory in the running
Debian system? If you can, the idea is to partition the drive you want
to put Slackware on, run setup, do an expert install from the Debian
hard drive where you have the copied minimum slackware files. Then,
with this installed, boot into the minimum Slack system and complete
the install. Since you were able to install Debian, perhaps it might
be easier to find out why the Slack install disk won't boot.

The reason any of this can work is that lilo or grub will bypass
the bios and boot a bootable partion it can see. Ahh...what do you use to boot Debian?

Cheers,
--Lawrence

That's right. I've tried ISOs from several different mirrors, and they do boot on other machines. The Dell is currently running FreeBSD 6, and I can mount the CD in FreeBSD with no problems. I'm using the FreeBSD bootloader, but that's not important because the BIOS is set to look for CDs first. And it does, for other distribution CDs at least.

Wow,

mc_03, am I correct in thinking that the FreeBSD bootloader has iso9660
as one of the loadable filesystems? Can you set the loader to boot the BSD equivalent of /dev/cdrom? If you can, this will bypass the bios and narrow down the possibilities of what is causing this problem. I know
that since you can boot other disks,this seems unlikely, but if the
bootloader can boot the Slack CD while the bios can't--that would be a
real clue. Just for the record, would you post what version of bios your Dell (dimenson/inspiron)4100 uses?

Same problem here;
checked the md5sum of my bittorrented slackware 11.0 dvd before burning and it matched. Then I burned the iso image using k3b. Agian in the gui the md5sum matched the published value. Then I burned the image with verify the burned image turned on. No errors were reported. Then tried to install on a different machine which I'm distro shopping on. The DVD was not seen as bootable.

I've downloaded by torrent, checked and burned the following DVD isos recently.

Mandriva Free DVD
Suse 10.2 DVD
Ubuntu & Kubuntu 6.06.1 DVD
Fedora core 6

They all booted properly on my test machine. The Slackware 11.0 DVD does not. I've burned it twice. There is something wrong with the dvd iso. I can read the DVD fine, it just does'nt boot.

edit:
I tried the dvd on a different machine and it DID work. Still, my test machine boots other DVDs just fine. The machine with the problem is a Gateway E4600se with an Intel Pentium 4 on a Intel i850 motherboard. It shipped in late 2001, it has the last available bios from Gateway. The DVD-RW drive is a LG on HDC and is about two years old, I've never had a problem with it (it has been used in other machines). It is the only CD on this machine.

AkBrian,
Actually, the problem stated by the OP(original poster) and others was that the first Slackware CD, i.e., the first CD of the six CD distribution, would not boot. But just to be sure, I'll ask again.

DemetriusCrisco, rEdgar, deanuc, mc_03, are you having problems with the first(or Boot CD) of the 6 CD distribution, or is it with the stand alone single Slackware *DVD* ? I would note that it is possible for a bios to be able to boot a CD and not be able to boot a DVD. So it _does_ make a difference.

However AkBrian, in your case this does not apply. Your DVD obviously should boot and doesn't. There appear to be only two possibilities, a bad DVD image is on torrent mirrors, or some peculiar combination of iso boot sectors and bios/hardware that
conflicts in the Slackware DVD. Frankly, I don't know how to track down either.

I'm going to widen this discussion to my LUG and see if anyone there has a clue-- &perhaps Slackware support, AOLS etc. will take a peek.

AkBrian, et. al., will you post what sort of system you're testing on? What Bios it has, and(harder) what the hard and optical drive setup is. Like is hda a master on ide1, a cdrw on ide1 as a slave etc... the basic set up is recorded at boot in /var/log/dmesg, mine looks like this:
The reason I ask for the disk setup is that a net search shows some problems exist for the Dell 4100 and booting with some Award bios versions. Unfortunately, the only way I know to tell Master/Slave is to look at the jumpers on the back of the drive. I truly understand if you don't want to take your 'puter apart...But if you know the info it could be helpful, especially for the Dell Dimension 4100.

DemetriusCrisco, I'm in the process of gathering info for a method to do a hard drive install of Slack 11 using your working Debian system...it may not be all that simple.. :-( But for now I need some sleep...

Regards,
--Lawrence

Sorry about the CD vs DVD thing. Seemed like the same problem, though. It is really a strange. Other distro's DVDs boot fine on this Intel i850 machine. This Slackware DVD boots fine on other machines. I've tried this Slackware DVD successfully on the following boxes;
Pentium Pro 200 dually (~1995 bittorrent box) with Liteon DVD-rom
Tyan AMD MPX MP2800+ dually with LG DVD-RW
Abit NF7 Nforce2 AMD XP2500+ with LG DVD-RW

More detailed data about the problem machine;

Gateway Model: E4600 SE
Intel Monterrey i850 mainboard 1.7Ghz p4
bios GB85010A.15.A.0046.P13

HDA 80gig Western Digital IDE HD jumper set to master
HDB none
HDC LG model GSA-4163B dvd-rw jumper set to master
HDD none

additional info from /var/log/dmesg
----------
Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: WDC WD800JB-32FSA0, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Probing IDE interface ide1...
hdc: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-4163B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: max request size: 512KiB
hda: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63, UDMA(100)
hda: cache flushes supported
-----------
The Intel boot agent does show activity on the DVD indicator light prior to booting from the harddrive, so it does see the dvd drive during bootup.

Hope this helps. This isn't an urgent problem for me, I just hope the info sheds some light on the issue..

This might be too obvious. I have a desktop with a CD re-writer and a DVD player. I occassionaly forget and put an install DVD in the CD drive. Nothing happens and the machine boots to the default OS.

One question, did you burn the CD's in the same drive that you are trying to boot from?

I have, from time to time, run into similar situations where the CD/DVD drive took too long to spin up and the bios timed out on booting from the CD. I usually solve this by hitting reset such that the CD is spinning to some degree already when the bios starts to look for bootable media in the CD/DVD drive - at least that's my non-technical explanation for what seems to happen .

The fact that other distros boot fine may rule this out as a possible cause. In all likelyhood it's the perfect combination of things that, if they occurred alone, would not be an issue - this perhaps being one of them. Maybe something funky regarding the way the Slackware CD is set-up combines with a slow spin-up of the drive.

This is probably a stupid question, but you DID remember to rub you belly and pat your head while saying "Praise Bob" three times fast as the box booted, right? This always helps.

Hi,
I described the problem as best I could on the slack usenet group and
William Hunt posted this on alt.os.linux.slackware:
A Clue indeed.

For Those of you with this problem and a working linux distro on your box, there is this possibility. In the documentation for the Slack 11 install CD read the README.TXT file at /mnt/cdrom/isolinux/README.TXT (or wherever you mount your CD's. It is titled
In this file you will find that one of the parameters supplied to mkisofs is -boot-load-size. PV has set this to 32 for the DVD and the CD in the case of Slack 11. Previously, this has been set lower...

If those of you with other distribution's CD's that do boot on you system would check to see what those distros set -boot-load-size to, burning your own slack CD as per the instructions in this readme, with the parameter set to the same value as the other distro's CD may solve the problem!

Thanks to Henrik Carlqvist at alt.os.linux.slackware who suggested this to grep the data from the other distro's boot CD:
Note the "-boot-load-size 4" setting. When I do this for a Slack 11 CD I get:
Be patient, the command may take awhile to complete.

It may be that yours is one of those bios's that won't accept the larger number but will accept a smaller one.

--Lawrence