I am very new to Linux and my be in a little over my head currently
but i have always found the best way to learn was to start at the hardest thing i could find and torture myself to learn it.

This my second attempt to install Slackware 12.0
i had no trouble the first time on a drive i use on my computer at school
on a very standard dell with a Pentium 4 in it slack went on fine with no trouble or errors.

I recently replaced the HDD in an older laptop that i have and was going to install Slack 12 on it to practice with.

I went to install from a disk i made from ISO's that i downloaded from the official sight and get the error

hdc lost interrupt

it seems just before that as its loading it is disabling IRQ 15 and then right after attempting to load the primary IDE1 onto that IQR and can't

i have read a lot of things on line so far and tried some different lines at boot to see if i could do things like disable acpi and so forth but nothing is working for me

someone made the suggestion that i recompile a Kernel for this specific problem but as a hard core NOOB to the Linux world i don't know the process yet for doing such.

i have other computers at my disposal for use if need and would really love any help some of you pro's could offer in this matter.

i am trying to install on an Acer laptop with a Pentium 3 850mhz dvd rom
256 megs of ram on a brand new blank 40 gig hdd, the dvd rom is a 24x atapi drive

here is a more complete look at the error it is giving me


disabling IRQ #15
ide1 at 0x170-0x177, 0x376 on IRQ15

and then down farther it says


ide-cd: cmd 0x5a timed out
hdc: lost interrupt


sorry this is so long but i wanted to get enough info in here and i am sure i have missed something. if more info is needed please tell me what and thank you in advance for any help you all can offer me. By the way it is the most current kernel i am trying to attempt installing not sure of the number but it is the newest release from the official slackware sight.

Do I assume correctly that you can run Slackware as a liveCD; you just can't install it to hard drive?

If Slack doesn't run as liveCD, can you run a liveCD without problems, other than writing to hard drive?

If you have a liveCD you can run, try running it and run 'fdisk -l' to see if fdisk sees the disk and it's partitions (or lack of partitions). If fdisk cant't see the disk, you may have a communication failure (with the hard drive).

This suggests to me that the failure to communicate with the hard drive occurs at the point modprobe tries to load the ide-cd module. That would happen if there is a drive failure. Drive failure in this case could be one of two things:
a) when you installed the new drive, you did not firmly seat the IDE cable. i.e., a bad connection.
b) the drive is bad out of the box.