Hey everyone,

well, i've decided to install a copy of linux, and, by the advice of a few friends, chose slackware 9.0.

So i downloaded the ISO, made sure the checksum was right, burned it, and tried to boot off it. I got to the load kernel prompt, and after reading, typed bare.i and pressed enter. It then did a bunch of stuff, and then started listing off my IDE devices. It listed my HD, my DVD ROM(from which i was trying to install) my CDRW...and then stopped. I waited for a long time, but it didn't do anything. I then tried booting off a boot disk, but the same thing happened. I tried writing install.1 onto a floppy and putting it in after it stopeed, but nothing happenned. I even tried unplugging the cdrw (it detected it in the load even when i disabled it in the BIOS), but it just went to the DVD drive and then stopped.

Am I doing something wrong? What's the problem?

Thanks,
-fibbi

if slackware's not installed yet, just hit return at the boot: prompt. typing "bare.i root=/" etc. is to emergency boot your system when linux is already installed.

yeah, i've done both, and neither work. (btw, i wasn't typing bare.i root=/, just bare.i).

bare.i contains support for alot of drives but not all. try aztech.i, cd32a.i, cd535 .i or maybe isp16.i plug and play is 'off' in the bios?

yeah, i think it mentions some F keys to list other kernels you could try. sorry, i thought you were typing in the whole example line it gives.

The install CD doesn't include all of those kernels, but i've booted with most of the included ones (including old_cd.i which supposedly includes all the old proprietary drives, but my drive is a brand new sony, so i doubt that it needs a special driver).

I've tried with plug and play O/S both on and off in my BIOS to no avail.

Any other suggestions?

YAY! I fixed it!

Okay, so I played around with it for a while, not getting anywhere. Then I remembered that i'd installed redhat 9 a while back, and wondered if it used the same boot method. I found a redhat 9 bootdisk image, wrote it, booted...same thing.

Then I tried using the exact same CD i had previously used to install redhat. It had worked before, so now i thought i should give it a try.

No dice. Okay, so the problem must lie in something i've done to my system since June. The only hardware change that could possibly affect it was the addition of an audigy, so i popped that out, but it still wouldn't work.

Then I began to think about BIOS updates, and wondered if I should flash an old BIOS to see if that would work, but then I remembered that the new ASUS BIOSes had added a whole bunch of little tweaks lately (such as turbo mode), and wondered if there was anything like that for the IDE. Sure enough, I went into the BIOS and found "Enhanced IDE mode" on. Turned it off, and it booted like a charm.

Now that I've figured that out, is there somewhere i should go to report that the kernel chokes on Enhanced IDE mode? Or would a fix for this have already been built into the 2.6 kernel?