First of all let me state that I don't actually know if I have a problem here or if it's just a result of my hardware being so old.

I have a IBM Thinkpad 380Z with 64 MG's of RAM. When I try to boot from CD to install Slack I am given the typical boot: prompt. I hit enter and first it displays "Loading /kernels/bare.i/bzImage.......................". So far so good, right after that though it displays "Loading initrd.img..." and then it hangs. The odd thing is that the activity light for the CD rom drive is still indicating that data is being read from the CD. Because of this I don't know if I have a genuine problem (maybe not enough RAM?) or if my hardware is so old it's just taking forever.

Any insight into the matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time and sorry if I was obscure in describing my problem.

Your CD-Rom drive is working? After you finish the install take the CD out of the drive.

you may want to try vector linux, its slackware based and is designed for older hardware

I would say the md5 sum may need to be checked. The cd may be bad. It should install even with 64MB ram.

I would say in addition to what these guys told you, I would recommend that when you burn the iso file, try burning it at 8x or slower, disc at once method.

That's the thing, when I boot up with DSL in the CD drive it boots up fine. So it probably is something wrong with the CD. How exactly does on use a md5 sum to make sure your ISO is good (in Windows)?

I checked the md5 sum on the disk and it matched up fine. I'm trying to create a boot disk on floppy to see how that goes, but doing so is proving to be difficult. In windows whenever I click on any files on the the CD's (such as the readme for rawrite) the window's file browser freezes and stops responding. Whenever I attempt to use Rawrite 2 the program simply vanishes when I give it the path to bare.i (or anything else for that matter). Are there any other options at my disposal for making a boot disks on floppy? If I installed DSL onto my hardrive would it be possible for me to make a boot disk with that?

Tnak you for your time.

i would immagine if you just BOOT into dsl or some other live cd and use dd to make the floppy it should work.

Perhaps you have troublesome peripherals? Try disconnecting the unnecessary, particularly USB devices.

The slackware installer sets up a 64MB ramdisk, if I recall correctly. Try using the install.zip from the rootdisks directory. You'll need about a 20MB FAT partition to unzip it to. If I were you I'd just use the swap partition for this during installation, then change the type and do a mkswap on it and add to the fstab.