I am on a rig that i installed RedHat right onto the sata drive... All that i had to do was get my hands on the right driver... Which I have for my promise chip built into the mobo. During the Red Hat install, it asked me for the driver disk, I simply slapped it in there and away I went. The problem is that i have no idea how to do this during the slackware installation.

In short I just really need to know how to add a driver before I install Slackware.


[BTW I did search the forum very well because I thought this would have already been asked, but I found nothing that helped... If there is another post that will save me, please give me the link and I will leave with my tail between my legs.]

why don't you try red hat linux 9.0?
it should recognize automatically.

I'm not sure if I misunderstand your answer or what but I'm not sure you even read my post... I used Redhat... It was fine... I installed it and I am done with it... I tried slackware on a box with Parellel ATA(IDE) and I loved it. I want it on my SATA box because it just runs so well...

But yeah... The whole idea is getting slackware on my SATA drives.

I tried using the Unsupported sata.i kernel, but I can't seem to get past where it asks for the Ramdisk...

OK so I boot up and it boots to the floppy... I press enter, and booting continues on the boot disk... Then it asks for the RAM disk which I have added the image of "color.gz" to. Then the system hangs on "Compressed image found at block zero" After a little while, the floppy drive stops making noise and nothing happens... i can reboot though by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del...


I've tried at least 8 different versions of color.gz (each of them being between 2.4megs and 10 megs) None of them get any farther than "Compressed image found at block zero".

Well since no one replied to that... I am to assume that no one knows...


So I am thinking of a completely different solution...

First I need to know if Kernel 2.6.1 has support for SATA... I have heard a few things here and there about it maybe working in suggested solutions to problems with SATA drives....

I am planning to take an old IDE drive, install slackware on it and update the kernel to 2.6.1 (hopefully with SATA support)

Then, how might I copy the image of that disk on to the SATA drive?
Do I need to partition and format the Sata drive before I copy the image over?
Will it make much of a difference that I am using a 30 gig IDE to copy over to an 80 gig SATA?

try the install.zip.README option from the /rootdisk
basically you unzip the file to a dos partion on a disk and mount that instead of the root floppy... maby better luck that way..
if there's a way to put the zip file on the sata disk of course
just keep on trying dude...