Since I can't boot from either a floppy or cdrom on an old computer, I'm going to move its hard drive to a computer that will boot from cdrom to install slackware. Check my other thread on that problem: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=198887

I'm going to format the disk, then run the setup program. My question is, does the setup program check the hardware attached to the computer and configure the installation for that setup? Or will this procedure work with no problems as long as I move the hard drive back to its own computer before starting for the first time?

Thanks for all the help.

My question is, does the setup program check the hardware attached to the computer and configure the installation for that setup?

Yes it does. It will install drivers for the current hardware. I guess you don't want it.
You must figure out a way to boot from floppies, at least.

setup doesn't hard-configure too much hardware. There's a way to do what you want. The easiest way to do it though would be to create a small DOS partition on the hard drive and make it bootable with sys x: then, when you install, be sure to install loadlin and after installation finishes, but before rebooting, move loadlin.exe and linux.bat to the DOS/FAT partition and configure linux.bat to boot the linux installation according to where it will be. Or after moving the disk, just let it boot into DOS and use edit to configure linux.bat. then, when you have booted the new system you can run lilo and install to the MBR.

Do you know how much hardware it configures, such as what devices specifically? I'm just a noob, but I thought it would only install packages, then hotplug and the kernel and modules would do the rest on the first boot.

About the DOS partition, I don't fully understand what you're saying, that I need to create a bootable DOS partition and install loadlin onto it? What would be the difference between that and wiping the disk and installing slack? I guess I'm just lost...

I haven't had any luck finding a bios upgrade, and the machine doesn't want to boot from a floppy, so moving the hard drive looks to be the best option so far.

I think I understand what you mean about adding a DOS partition and using that to boot the cdrom to begin the install. Since the hard drive is only 1624MB, I don't really want to waste any space, so I could move the hard drive, make 2 partitions: / and swap, add some kind of boot utility so I can move it back and use it to install from cdrom.

I'm a so can anybody give me some instructions for setting up a bootloader this way, without installing linux on the disk yet?

I finally got around to moving the hard drive then installing and moving it back, and there's no problems so far. When I get some time, I'll compile a 2.6.x kernel on it so it will hopefully run faster.