Id like to get pclinuxos installed on sda3 i currently have slackware on sda1 and the iso files on sda2 but i cant get it to boot, its looking for a cd that doesnt exist. i've tried ubuntu and got a little farther. i got a console and could mount sda1 and get access to the iso, but it still wouldn't run the installer. any suggestions? the only nocd install i've evver done successfully is slackware and dsl.

You can mount an iso this way
modprobe loop
mount o loop -t iso9660 file.iso /somewhere

and it's accessible. You can't directly install from it, as it likes its own kernel. Can you put it on a usb drive and boot from that?

I don't know what boot loader you have, but perhaps you could directly boot the iso with a careful entry. I have no ideas for you, but check the site (grub or lilo)

well i got ubuntu installer to run, but still failed at pclos, i can't mount the iso or even use the iso cause the comand line i get with the just the initrd won't let me mount the hdd. as far as i know grub doesn't allow booting from iso, and now that i have ubuntu i have grub2, but i'm not really sure how to work it. it's completely differant from grub legacy and even then i'm not sure grub2 will boot an iso. not to mention the kernel would have to see the iso as a device, not a file in order to mount and load it properly.

Yes it will. That's not to say it will boot ANY iso. You said you have Ubuntu, where? Installed on the hard drive? If Ubuntu with Grub2 is on the hard drive and you have the iso file on the hard drive it might work. I don't think it will but...? Below is an example menuentry for Grub2 which boots an iso image of Ubuntu from a DVD:

Similar entries work for different Ubuntu distributions. I tried PCLinuxOS-2010, didn't work. Don't know why. The only non-Ubuntu iso I have managed to boot this way is Parted Magic. I think it might be easier from a Grub2 installed on a hard drive. When I was googling this, I found a lot of sites on booting an isoimage from a hard drive with Grub2.

my current partition structure is

sda1 slackware
sda2 installer files
sda3 extended
sda5 ubuntu
40 gb unpartitioned
sda4 swap

and pclos 2010 gnome is what i'm trying to install. it's the only distro i really like other than slackware, and cause of my onboard video i'm having trouble with slackware, xfce is running rough and kde4 not at all.

It strikes me that a better way to go at things is to fix video in slackware. You will not magically get some driver elsewhere that doesn't exist or can't be installed in slackware, and you might end up configuring things for a week to find that out.

there's no fix or at least none anybody knows of. the only workaround is to use a gnome based distro, and i don't feel like going through the pain of stripping kde from slackware and building and configuring all the packages manually for gnome being that slackware doesn't natively support gnome at all.

[edit] here's the thread for the issue with the graphics:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d-kde4-875631/

It's bad all right. I would start here

http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support...hics/intel845g

grab that driver and specify 'intel.modeset=0' (or whatever the exact syntax is) in modprobe.d/video.conf and the kernel boot line. See what comes up then. KMS seems to be the issue, but you can kill that.