hi all,

i'm really new to linux and i'm already disapointed with redhat which was my first distro ever. looking for an alternative i found slackware and all the good (fast, stable, etc) and bad (dificult to live with, not for newbies, bla bla...) comments that come with it. i must say that i was a bit afraid of the installation process as i've heard horible stories and i really need my only pc working this period. good thing is i found a lot of stories about painless and straight forward installations so i desided to give it a try and see what happens.

and there i am making the boot and root floppies and... i can't even boot from the installation disk!!! (this must be a world record)

here are the details. i'm trying to install slackware 9.1 on old vaio 505 machine with winxp already on the first partition and redhat 9 on a different partition of the same drive (where i want to install slackware). my external cd-r is not working and i'm left with an external floppy drive (usb) to boot from, and try to install from the isos on an other partition.

i made the boot and root disks as described on the slackware site (i have already tried different rawrite versions and different boot disks) and when i boot everything looks fine. i can see the first screen and the prompt to add something if needed, it starts loading from the floppy, and after a couple of minutes it starts printing some things on the screen (too fast for details). it stops with the message:

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-2, errno=2
vfs: insert root floppy disk to be loaded into ram disk and press enter

if i put any disk (or even if i don't) and press enter (or enything else) i get the following (it doesn't even read the floppy):

kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-2, errno=2
kmod: failed to exec /sbin/modprobe -s -k block-major-2, errno=2

vfs: cannot open root device "fd0u1440" or 02:00
please apend a correct "root=" boot option
kernel panic: vfs: unable to mount root fs on 02:00

i can't find much info on that but it seems that there is a problem recognizing my floppy drive at some point (?).

i guess if i can't find the answer here i can't find it at all so i count on you guys i'm using linux for only two or three months now and i never had to ask for something before, the answers are all in these forums. (er... yeah this is my first post. wellcome me with some good ideas!!! :P )

"vfs: cannot open root device "fd0u1440" or 02:00
please apend a correct "root=" boot option
kernel panic: vfs: unable to mount root fs on 02:00"

It is looking for your floppy drive on /dev/fd0. You have your floppy on USB. I do not know what the usb floppy address is but if you know then pass that address with root=. Otherwise you could attach a floppy drive to the floppy drive controller and use that.


___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

well... my floppy drive is on /dev/fd0. at least it gets autodetected and works just fine in redhat as /dev/fd0. so if i'm not missing something it should work the same (?).

searching the forum and the web i found several reports on problems with slackware and usb during booting and install but no solution that fits my situation yet (removing my floppy is not going to work, is it?? :P).

btw, i didn't mention earlier that this is a notebook so i can't attach a "real" floppy drive.

it seems that redhat can be wrong but jailbait cannot :P. i can't understand why it works like that in redhat but my floppy should actualy be /dev/sda as i found out that:

"The USB floppy and the Memory stick are supported via the USB mass storage driver which in turn needs SCSI emulation. The floppy and memory stick are both accessed as emulated SCSI devices."

i guess i'll have to try with one of the .s boot disks and see how it goes. many thanks jailbait, this looks like the right direction. i'll post back l8r anyway

" i can't understand why it works like that in redhat but my floppy should actualy be /dev/sda as i found out that:"

This is probably a case where Red Hat has gone to pains to make sure that things work regardless of where you attach your floppy and Slackware does it by the book and it is up to you to know what you are doing.

___________________________________
Be prepared. Create a LifeBoat CD.
http://users.rcn.com/srstites/LifeBo...home.page.html

Steve Stites

nope... the .s disks didn't help much, there is still something missing.

anyway, before giving up i thought i should give loadlin a try and it did the trick. more info can be found on the slackwer site (under faq). the only case not covered on the site (and the one that stoped me from the begining) is the case of winxp (no dos) and ntfs (no access from dos).

i just moved loadlin on the fat32 partition that i use as share between windows and linux and i booted from a win98 disk (for the dos part) that i downloaded from the net. i just had to skip the kernel installation and the boot disk option but i had no problems with lilo and everithing looks just fine.

just in case someone didn't noticed... i hate unfinished posts