Im trying to get a minimalist version of slackware up and running on an old pentium 1 based system. This computer just came from the south pole where it was used to run the recently decomissioned AST/RO radio telescope. Our lab acquired a lot of the equipment from the telescope and we are trying to upgrade the computers. Previously they were using lynx os, which was painful to use.

The problem I am running into is this. The computer is sufficiently old enough that the bios does not allow booting from the cd. Both the cdrom and hard drive are connected via an adaptec scsi card. In order to boot and have the hard drive recognized, I need to use the boot floppy adaptec.s. However, this boot floppy image seems to later be incapable of mounting the cdrom, which is my desired source media. It seems like I might need to try a different boot disk to get cdrom support, but none of the other boot disks appear to support the adaptec scsi card which is necessary to recognize both cdrom and hard drive.

Another oddity is that when I run cat /proc/scsi/scsi it recognizes a seagate hardrive on scsi channel 0, id 3, and a matshita cdrom on scsi channel channel 0, id 4. I just can't seem to get the installer to mount it, and can't seem to do so manually either.

Suggestions?

Did you try the most part of the bootdisks in:

ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackwar...10.2/bootdisks

?

Edit: If you go to:

ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/

You will see lots of versions from slackware, like:

Directory: slackware-10.0 07/19/2006 03:54:00 AM
Directory: slackware-10.1 07/19/2006 03:56:00 AM
Directory: slackware-10.2 07/19/2006 03:59:00 AM
Directory: slackware-10.2-iso 09/14/2005 12:00:00 AM
Directory: slackware-3.3 10/03/1997 12:00:00 AM
Directory: slackware-3.4 05/23/1998 12:00:00 AM
Directory: slackware-3.5 10/16/1998 12:00:00 AM
Directory: slackware-3.6 03/19/1999 12:00:00 AM
Directory: slackware-3.9 07/16/1999 12:00:00 AM
Directory: slackware-4.0 02/22/2001 12:00:00 AM
Directory: slackware-7.0 06/22/2002 12:00:00 AM
Directory: slackware-7.1 09/14/2005 12:00:00 AM
Directory: slackware-8.0 08/29/2004 12:00:00 AM
Directory: slackware-8.1 06/29/2006 07:31:00 PM
Directory: slackware-9.0 06/28/2006 12:01:00 AM
Directory: slackware-9.1 06/28/2006 12:03:00 AM

And if you browse to any of the versions you will see a "bootdisks" directory (or something like it), you could try to use one of them too...

Hope it helped

You probably need to load one or more kernel modules to get access to the various devices.
Your best bet is probably to compile a custom kernel on another machine or on this one once you have it booted. You may have to work with which modules to hard-compile and which can be left as modules. The kernel option for booting from external or extended IDE devices may help you to achieve a regular hard-disk boot.
Otherwise, you could create use mkinitrd to create an initrd which will load the modules before mounting the rootfs.