re-install woes.
 

I made the switch from window's about a year ago. I had slack working great with my sony vaio laptop, with external cd-rw.

I decided to go back to a duel boot with win2k temporarely to use my income tax software. Bad, bad mistake. For some strange reason now, my slackware disk 1 will not boot.

Ok, so I used RAWRITENT and made boot disk's. Still no luck when it come's to choosing installation source. If I let it try to scan for my cdrom, no luck. If I eject my cdrom, and close it again just before choosing scan for cdrom, it detect's the disk in the drive, state's it detected a cdrom at /dev/hdc, and just return's back to the setup screen. I would try to install from my cd-rw, but it get's detected on boot, but then state's maybe a bad usb cable, and disable's both my usb port's.

I've tried booting with adaptec.s, bare.i, bareacpi.i, and scsi.s.

I made a 700mb fat32 partition, copied all slack disk 1 file's into it, and tried to install from that, with no luck.

I'm lost as to what to try next. Can someone please help me.

thank's
chopp

Sorry, I'm not understanding you.

You "went back to a dual-boot with W2K temporarily"-- doesn't that mean that you installed Win2K next to your Slack install, so that you would have both OSes on your system?

That is the traditional meaning of "dual-boot"-- so why are you now trying to reinstall Slack (I presume that's why you're trying to boot from CD 1)? Or are you just trying to fix LiLO (since installing Win2K would have overwritten your Slack bootloader)?

It's hard to tell you what to try when it's not so clear what you're trying to accomplish. Knowing what specific error you get when you try to boot the Slack CD would help, too.

Also, have you tried changing your USB cable? It's possible that the error message you're getting is in fact literally true.

I see that you have Knoppix listed as one of your distributions. Do you have a Knoppix CD? Can you boot from that? If so, you can reinstall the Slack bootloader (if that's what you're trying to do) from within a running Knoppix system (mount the Slack root partition, edit /etc/lilo.conf if necessary, chroot the Slack partition and run /sbin/lilo, reboot).

fresh install
 

sorry, I did not mean to say dual boot. I did a fresh install back to win2k.
Now I'm trying to re-install slack.

When I reboot with disk 1, it will not boot from the disk. When I reboot using a boot floppy and root disk's, when I choose source for the install, and then cdrom, and have it scan for a installation disk it fail's.

If I point it at /dev/hdc, it state's an installation disk is found, but then just take's me back to the main setup window.

As far as the external cd-rw goes, in all the time's I have installed slack on this laptop, it has never worked until after the installation. The cable is fine too, I have just been using the drive in window's.

I tried a RUNT boot disk, the cd-rw was recognized, but then I get a kernel panic.

any ideas?

thank's
chopp

OK, now let me try to get this straight.

In your first post, you said this is a Vaio laptop with an external CR-RW. No mention is made of any other CD-RW drive present on the system.

In your second post, you say that this CD-RW has never worked until after installation.

How then, did you install Slack the other times, and is this the method that is no longer working? What is the error when trying to install from the FAT32 partition? Is the partition mounted? Does Slack even install from a FAT32 partition? I would think it would need to be ext2.

Is it possible to do a network install? Or make "a pile of floppies" as suggested at slackware.org and install the base fs from floppy?

OK, now let me set you straight.


That is correct, I have never been able to use my "external usb cd-rw" till after a complete installation of slack. There is also nothing in my bios to boot from such a device.

Every other install I have done, has worked just fine with my cdrom on the laptop.

I am now going to try to install from a iso image on my window's partition, as per the instruction's on slackware's site. It does not state whether the partition has to be fat, or ntfs. Guess I'll try it first as fat.

Network install won't work I'm guessing because the only other pc on my lan is running win2k as well

Hope this clarifies as to what problem's I am having, and what I am trying to achieve.

chopp