Installation Trouble
 

ok i am very new to all this. but i am willing to but a great effort into gettign this to work. what is goign on it i am tryign to install Slack 10.1 on a older machine
Have a old PoS box running a Asus P/I P55TP4XE motherboard, with a scsi HD(2gig)Will not boot to CD-rom only boots to floppy,The motherboard IDEs do not work, only active IDE is the one on the older soundblaster sound card.
I need to know how we can boot from the CD that is attatched to the soundblaster IDE. We assume a floppy boot it needed we have tried old_cd.1 boot image to no avail. Would anyone have any suggestions

Is your CD drive a SCSI or IDE?

If it is IDE and your IDE controllers are dead, it's time to get a new motherboard.

If it's a SCSI, you can boot from the floppy, find your hard drive and copy all files from the CD to the HD, although you will be in a bit of a tight because of the small size of your HD.

If you're trying to do this with Slack then this may work. Just try to do a minimal install, later find your HD and make sure you can access it, then finish installing what is needed. Have you considered doing a network install? No doubt you'll need a LAN connection with broadband internet to do this.

Actually no i had not thought of that......i am not sure hw i would go about doign it. What is going on is we have a active IDE on the soundblaster card

Story with this compy is my dad brought it home from work, it had a currupted version of windows 95. Now i was messing around with it and i had the HD running and the CD rom was running. I would access it, my stupid self decided it would be bright to format it. So now, no access to CDrom. but when i openned it the IDE was connected to the sould blaster card. it is really messed up on how they had it configured, but i am not much a hardware kind of guy....::loaths:: i am but discovering the maricle of linux::smiles:; but i beleive i could get this runnign with some help.

But we do know the following

- Floppy will rea don boot,
- CD-ROM has worked before, After a format it stopped working.
- CD-ROM connected Via IDE to a IDE jack on the soundblaster(which i found messed up)

I am confused.

It worked before?
You reformatted the HD?
Did it boot from CD before?


I wouldn't mess with how the hardware is configured unless I knew it was wired wrong.
If all you did was reformat the hard drive you should still have working IDE if they worked before.

Did you check in the the bios that boot from cd was before boot from hd?
I always set my bios to boot:
Floppy
CD/DVD
HD

I am not sure what the minimum requirements for slack 10.1 is, but it might be slower on an older machine.

I have if running fine on a Gateway P2 with Fluxbox as the windows manager and it runs plenty fast.

I would normally say boot up a knoppix disc first to see how linux does recognizing your hardware.
But,....
Try SLAX.(live distro)
Damn Small Linux is another good choice and so is Vector.
If the live cd's work fine then try slack 10.1.

I hope this makes sense, and helps.
Blair

I understand your problem but unfortunately can't think of a solution other than to replace some of the hardware (ie motherboard) to get yourself into a better situation to be able to install. I had a 486 pc with the cdrom setup the same way. It was a pain because you had to use dos and setup the cdrom drivers first with config.sys/autoexec.bat (I forget exactly how) and then I was able to run win9x setup from the cd from dos.

You're in a tough spot, because you need old_cd.i to use the cdrom BUT you also need one of the SCSI kernels too. If it was me, I'd try to replace some of the hardware. It doesn't have to cost a lot, just find some old components that will work together a little better.

Good Luck :)

Yeah i am actually now looking into getting a used Athlon MB and a AMD 500 meg chip. Thanks for all your suggestions and attempts to help resolve the issue. but looks like a pure system upgrade is the only hope