A friend of mine gave me a couple of slackware cd's to try on an old computer (300mhz 64 ram 4gb hd). Will this work on a computer that is this old?

Also, I have been trying to boot with the cds but the startup never detcts them! it says it is booting from ide-0... what the heck does that mean?

Also, is there a good chatroom to get some possible instant help?

Any help is appreciated

well, yeah, no problems with slackware on that machine, it should run fine.

also, you are setting the bios to try to boot from the cd first correct, instead of the ide-0 which is your hard drive?
if you have you bios set to boot from the cdrom and it still doesn't detect the cd's, then they might be bad cd's, are they burned copies or retail?

They will not boot if they are CDRWs, I tried that already. They MUST be CDRs for them to boot. Also, as trickykid said, you must also make sure your bios is set for booting off your CD, a motherboard that old may not support it. Depending on BIOS date, go into your BIOS and find the "boot" section, and put the order of boot to CD, Floppy, IDE-0. I just finished loading redhat and did have some troubles at load up, but all is well now.

ok... finally i figured out what the bios is... its that thing where yu have to hold down -del to get into...

ok... i found the bootup devices... one of them said cdrom so itried that and they booted up fine!

now it says something about partitions...what are they? i kind of have an idea ... i have windows 98 on there as well, does that mean i have lose that to install linux? i sincerely hope not... anyways, if someone could tell me what partitions are and what they mean by "fdisk" i would really appreciate it!

if you email me at paul@thecliogeek.com I will find a way to contact you and explain it. But basicly, a partition make one drive into two or more. "Virtual Drives" that is...

Paul

is there any reason why this has to be done? dividing the hard drive? i was told you could put linux and windows on the same hard drive.

if this is so, how do i go about it... i noticed there were options with file systems and mounting points (?) ... im really afraid to destroy my win98...

any help, thanks!

lol... well, it's not wise to keep (nor possible 99.99% of the time) to keep two different OSs on the same partition. If you try... the second one over-writes the your Windows registry (yes, this is VERY bad) . Because..... (theorically, if possible to do) if you have two different OSs on a partition, the computer doesn't know which OS to boot up. This even pertains to having Win98 and Win2000/WinNT. That is why in FDISK it asks you which to set as "primary"... so it knows which boot record to start up.

Let's just say... YOU MUST have a second partition to install Linux (any distro) or you WILL lose Windozzzz.

Paul

What has been said above doesn't have anything to do with partitions.
In this case, running linux and windows on the same physical harddisk, the necessity of partitioning has to do with the different kind of filesystems that windows and linux use. It meens that they store information differently on the disk.
By dividing your hard disk into several partitions you separate them from eachother, meaning they will have their own 'table of contents'.

Primary as used above is the type of the partition, primary or extended. Ide-standard let us have 4 primary partitions on the same physical disk. As time went by this got to little so they invented the extended partition. This is a special kind of primary partition that let us make logical partitions within the extended one.

For BIOS to know where to find the OS or a bootloader one partition need to be marked as active. The first 512 byte this partition contain the bootloader wich reads in the system to memory.
You can have linux on a windows partition although it is harder to get working. This is accomplished with a filesystem called UMSDOS. This is a filesystem that reside on the windows partition as a BIG file. When linux boot it interprets this file as the linux file space.

ok now i am not using this program called fdisk... i am using something the setup screen for parttioning. it says "hda1" is a fat32... but hda1 is 4gb (my entire hd) and says there is no space for anymore partitions...

does this mean i now have to split the fat32(windows) partition? if i split it then will i lose all of my windows data? also, how exactly do i split it? because this setup program does not offer a way to do it or explain how to do it.

thank you!

yeah if you have a 4 gig hard drive, with only windows on it.. your going to need a program designed to be able to split existing partitions with data on them safely, you might want to look into partition magic or something like that you can pick up at the local store or maybe download off the net. disk druid what your seeing during the linux install can't do that...
also, you will want to defrag windows first most likely, use partition magic to split the drive into two separate partitions, then you can load linux and install from there.

As trickykid said, if your drive is currently formatted as one Windows (FAT32) volume, you need to use a non-destructive partitioning utility to shrink the Win partition (and yes, you should defrag first to move all of the Win data to the front of the Win partition). Partition Magic will work, but it isn't freeware. For freeware solutions, check out fips.exe (which may be included on your Linux install CDs) or Ranish Partition Manager. Both of these programs can do non-destructive partition resizing, without the cost of Partition Magic.

Hmmm... I was under the impression that this was a newbie question. I was also under the impression that if this gentleman didn't know about FDISK, he surely wouldn't know about UMSDOS. My explaination was out of the "Beginner's MS-DOS Book", yes it is a very simple, and maybe not a complete answer. But I was trying to keep it simple, and understandable for a beginner. I have taught DOS for two years and know that you must keep it simple at first.

I guess I made several assumptions/misstakes by posting in this forum. One is that this was for teaching and not for making someone look/feel stupid.

"What has been said above doesn't have anything to do with partitions.
In this case, running linux and windows on the same physical harddisk, the necessity of partitioning has to do with the different kind of filesystems that windows and linux use. "

The second sentence would of done the trick, yet the first had to be self-serving and tactless.

Second assumption is that the moderators were to keep it simple. My explaination was very simple, it got the point across that for a beginner, it was unwise to try to do two operating systems on one partition. Oh yes, it is possible to have it that way, but as the tactless moderator explained, it is VERY difficult to do and maintain.

I also made the misstake of giving a "Microsoft" explaination of FDISK. The original question was that he didn't want to lose windows, so I guess I gave a simple MS answer to a a Linux question.

I apologize for posting such a simple answer and will not post again. In fact, I will learn Linux just the way I have all my other things I needed for my masters degree (Oh, I can be self-serving too) in Computer Technology, by reading the book. And not from a forum that "hires" people 'that wants to let everyone know how smart they are by posting statement like I just read'.

jackthehacker, I apologize for assuming....