This is my first time trying Slackware so i'm a

I plan on dual booting Windows XP/Slackware on my IDE drive. Windows XP is currently on my first partition of 18.6 GB. I plan on installing Slackware on my D drive (18.6 GB) and splitting that into two primary partitions for my swap and /.

When I boot Slackware up i choose the bare.i kernel. I then choose my keyboard layout and then log in. When I try to run cfdisk I get this message: FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive. And when I type fdisk /dev/hda I get this message: Unable to open /dev/hda.

Help would be very much appreciated!

You have to be root to enter (c)fdisk. That sounds like your problem.

I did log in as 'root'.

I'm lost as to what to do next so currently i'm trying to find information on the web about this.

Yeah, I was going to say - you haven't even had a chance to create a new user yet.

With a 40-gig drive, I'm assuming it's fairly new. Are you positive it's IDE? And have you checked the cable? I discovered Windows will run a primary master connected to the primary slave connector when I bought a used box hooked up that way but when I added the second drive Linux didn't like them being hooked backwards. *lol* So maybe that's an issue. If it's IDE but some kind of funky IDE, try another kernel image. There are docs on the Slack disk describing the various kernel images - I think there's something like 60 of them. Um. Disabling PnP in the BIOS? A good catch-all suggestion. That's really all I can think of off-hand.

Ok, I'm not familiar to hardware stuff or terms so please take it easy on me.

I don't know what a primary master or slave is but I do know I only have one drive split into two 18.6 GB's partitions with XP on the C drive to clarify.

I tried disabling the PnP in the BIOS but that didn't do anything.

As for the kernels, the slackware cd only had a couple of other kernels to chose from, but I did go to the Slackware site and found more, but that would require me to put it on a boot disk, right?

Still, i'm unsure which kernel to use.

My disk drive is a Maxtor 4D040H2 and I have IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Is this useful information to help me, and if not what do you need to know?

Nah, okay - I think that is indeed IDE. IDE and SCSI are two different kinds of controllers and if you had a SCSI drive, you'd need a SCSI-enabled kernel rather than bare.i. But that should be good.

Most computers have two channels to which you can hook up two drives apiece. So there's the primary and the secondary channels. And one of the drives on each needs to be master and the other slave. With one drive you've got the equivalent of a primary master, I guess, but it's not an issue there either.

PnP didn't work. Damn. Sometimes Windows will let stuff share IRQs and such that they shouldn't. But oh well.

Yeah - if your disks don't have the kernels you'd need to make a boot floppy out of the other kernel but it actually sounds like bare.i should do fine.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to hand it off to somebody else. I had those very basic ideas but, beyond that, I don't know why it wouldn't recognize your drive right off the bat. Um. I feel like I'm missing something but I can't think of it. Hopefully somebody else will help you out soon - this place is crawling with gurus.

Thanks for the help anyways. I now have a more accurate description of my problem for others to help me with.

I just hope we can figure out this problem out as quickly as possible. It pains me to see Windows XP load for the 20th time or so

I want my Slackware

Ok, I was thinking I might need to enter drive parameters, but I don't know where to get the information for the number of cylinders, heads, and sectors on my drive.

Please reply

If you can boot Linux at all, dmesg | grep -i chs | less will include the info.

I think I might of figured it out!

OK, so I decided to use the setup command. It said that there are no Linux filesystems or something like that, just Fat or Fat32.
Both my partitions are of Fat32 so thats ok. I choose target from the Slackware menu and told Linux to read the Fat32. SOOOO, when I did that it read the first partition as /dev/hdc1 and the second partition as /dev/hdc5 (extended?). I then exit out of setup and tried fdisk and it seemed to work. I haven't tried anything really yet so don't know if I'll have more problems or not.

And to think that I was going to give up on Slackware and try FreeBSD...
Not to say I won't try it once I get my own computer.

Time to install Slack