Hi: I boot with the Slackware 9.1 installation disk (disk #1) and everything goes well. At first, it asks to press <Enter> to boot the default kernel (bare.i). I press <Enter> and booting begins. When it is finished, it prompts me to select the keyboard (<Enter> for standard US keyboard). But here my USB keyboard has become quite unresponsive. I can read in the top lines this:

usb.c: deregistering driver usbkdb.

I wanted to install 9.1 for testing purposes. I could try to find some standard keyboard (non-USB) but maybe there is a workaround. Perhaps some kernel parameter I could put in the "boot:" prompt?

I tried with a PS/2 to USB keyboard adapter (my machine has a PS/2 connector besides USB) but, though it work on another machine, here it won't work.

If this is a newer machine it may be that the old kernel in 9.1 has problems with your hardware in general. You may get better results with installing into a virtual machine.

Thanks. I have solved the keyboard issue. But I'm having a more serious problem with my hard disk which, very unfortunately, is SATA (I did not see the host of troubles I was getting into by buying a machine with no parallel ATA or IDE controllers, for example, none of my live CDs will boot). 9.1 does not see the SATA disk drive. So I tried with 10.2, booting with the sata.i kernel (2.4.31): no use. The same with the test26.s kernel, which is a 2.6.13 kernel that supports SATA. The problem is that, when I run setup, it says it does not find any Linux partitions, despite the fact that the disk has a working slackware partition on it (ext2). And if I run cfdisk, still from within the prompt given by booting the 10.2 disk, it immediately quits with an error. Neither sata.i nor test26.s seem to understand the disk. A question here: could it be that by setting some parameter in the BIOS the problem could be solved? That if the installer uses some BIOS routines to do its work.

ADENDUM: the motherboard is a GA-H61M-S1. I find the following in the BIOS setup menu:
Disabling the SATA controllers simply asks for a medium to boot from. As to the SATA mode, I only tested the IDE mode. I did not see what happens with AHCI on.

On modern machines you always should use the AHCI option instead of IDE mode. AHCI should speed up disk access and also make more OSes run on the machine, since AHCI uses a generic driver, while the IDE mode needs a driver specifically for your storage controller. Try it with AHCI, if it still doesn't work I would still recommend to just use virtual machines, they will work.

AHCI did not solve the problem. I setup AHCI mode in the BIOS and still the setup program does not see or understand the hard disk.

I never used virtual machines and I think is something completely out of my possibilities. I mean it would be way too complicated for me.

Then simply use a recent version of Slackware (14.1, 14.0 or 13.37) on your real hardware.

I don't think so. In other threads you try to rip parts out of your system, like udev and so on. If you can handle that a VM is a no brainer.

I work on a machine with Slackware 14.0-64. I wanted to install 10.2 on another disk because it does not use udev and I would like to adopt an O.S. that does not use udev.

Try Crux or Gentoo. Using an unsupported OS is never an option.

Back to your one-legged Golem, are you?