Hi,

I'm trying to install Slackware on an old Pentium 166MHz. Because the computer is so old, it does not support booting from the CD-ROM drive and I have to use the boot floppies provided. However, I have a problem: the kernel throws a panic when I try to boot from the floppy disk.

The panic is caused by a null pointer dereference, which occurs just after the CD-ROM is detected and printed on the screen when the kernel is starting up. I have tried using different floppy disks, to see if one of them was corrupted, and I managed to boot the disks fine on another PC. I also tried disconnecting the ATA cable leading to the CD-ROM drive, and again the floppy boots fine. I have also tried swapping out the CD-ROM drive for a much more modern DVD-ROM drive, only to encounter the same error. I tried using the floppy disk image with support for proprietary CD-ROM interfaces, but again I see the same error.

Since the data needed to install Slackware is contained on a CD-ROM, it is pretty vital for me to be able to boot the floppy disk with the drive connected. Does anybody have any advice for me on this matter?

Thanks very much in advance.

SOLVED!

Yeah, so soon. The system has two hard drives and an optical drive. The two hard drives were on the primary channel, and the optical drive was on the secondary. I removed the smaller hard drive, then I moved the optical drive onto channel 1. Everything now seems to be going smoothly.

The funny thing is, this seems like a hardware problem (it wouldn't surprise me considering the age of the device) but the PC could boot into Windows 98 perfectly fine. In my experience, Linux has always been more fault-tolerant, to the extent of even being able to read FAT32 and NTFS partitions that Windows couldn't, which surprised me, but I guess Windows has Linux beat this time. Curious!