DSL "specifications packet not found" on install.
 

I recently downloaded the latest version of DSL to install on a new hard drive (formatted) in an old PC machine given to me. I burned a disk image off my Mac to install the distro but it didn't install, returning a "specifications packet failed" and not being able to locate the CD-ROM drive. I am not able to open the downloaded folders and look for the spec-packet to see if it is there. So the question is, is there a reason for the packet not being found besides not being there, or should I just download again, but from where? TFTH.

This may be a dumb question, but what is this "specifications packet"? Is it something sent from the CD-ROM as part of the ATAPI spec or am I even talking about the same thing?

Old PC's can be fun or a nightmare depending on how much non-standard stuff they contain and CD-ROMs from the early to mid 90's are among the worst--I don't think DSL (or most other distros) support them these days because they're so rare now.

Mike

Well it's a 166mhz machine. I partitioned/formatted the drive with a Windows OS disk and didn't install Windows as I wanted to run DSL on this machine. Maybe the distro doesn't incorporate a file the CD driver wants, but that would be weird as I have read of this OS being used on 486/DX equipment. Anyways, I got the distro booted on a 1Ghz Pentium machine so the disk is good and I'm checking it out. Maybe I'll first have to install a Windows OS on the older equipment? As it is, the first thing I've read off the DSL distro was that it wasn't intended as a HD install although that can be done.

If worse comes to worse, you can always go the LFS (Linux From Scratch) route. I have an *OLD* laptop (1996 Hitachi with P1-100 MHz non-MMX and 16 Megs RAM!) my ex wife bought me that I still haven't done anything with. It has an install of Win-95 1st Edition which doesn't support wireless. Instead of attempting to wipe the 800 MB drive I got my hands on a couple of new ones at 4 dollars a pop (nice deal), but I'm not sure even DSL will install because of the severely limited memory and expanding it to the max 40 MB it supports would be too expensive (worth way more than the entire laptop). The irony here is that this sub-notebook (no CD, which is problem #2--it was one of those that was meant to use an external one) has roughly the same form-factor as an EEE-PC, yet with a fraction of the processing power. But I just want to see if I can make it work, you know?

Mike