Any suggestions what I'm doing wrong...

I got a Slackware ISO off a magazine coverdisc and burned it to CD.

CD boots fine, partitioned my Hard Drive with 7GB for Slackware and 256MB for swap. I thought I'd leave some free space & add extra partitions at a later time.

Ran Setup and all seemed well, following instructions from Slackware's Website book, until I came to the Kernel Selection.

I selected the bare.i kernel for now, as I thought this was the vanilla kernel.

I then came to creating a boot disk. I was given 2 options: Create or Skip. I selected Create and got an error screen:

"Error Floppy format failed"
It didn't even check the drive before saying so. Odd, I thought, as Mandrake had no trouble creating a boot disk on this PC.
Decided to skip.

I then got the modem screen - That went fine.

I then got the No Root Password screen. I said Yes (I want to create a root password) and got this error off the bottom of the screen:

"chroot: cannot execute /usr/bin/passwd: No such file or directory.

Then Installation finishes, giving me no chance to configure mouse, ppp or anything else. Strange as to begin with I asked for every available package and full install.

As such I cannot boot into the partition. I've installed Mandrake on another partition, and I'm going to try the install again soon, but using Mandrake's Lilo to point to the Slack partition to see if anything actually installed.

Can anyone tell me what I've missed here. I feel that I've missed some fundamental point that is screwing up the whole install.

-What would cause the floppy to fail like that when I know it works OK

-Why can't chroot execute?

-Why don't I get the other configuration options when I've installed everything?

I know this is a huge post, with many questions, but if someone could give me a few suggestions on how to rectify some of these issues I'll give the install another shot and see what happens. I've tried various options on Kernel selection and the same thing keeps happening.

Maybe the cd did not create correctly...what do you mean you got the ISO off a magazine coverdisc?

I subscribe to PC Plus, which has ISOs of Linux distributions and software on their coverdisc DVD - I copied the ISO from the DVD to a directory on my windows partition and used Nero to burn the image to CD.

I'd have thought that the CD wouldn't boot that far if it was damaged, however I suppose I could burn the ISO to CD direct from the coverdisc DVD... See if that makes any difference?

Do it have a md5 check sum file also? You can check to see if it matches.

Ah, it doesn't no.

Nearest equivalent I can think of is to view the file's size on the DVD, then view it's size when it's burnt to disc, but I have a feeling that's not going to work, is it?

I can burn a new ISO tonight and try out the installation again. If there's a difference I'll post any new issues.

Thanks for pointing out the checksum stuff, BittaBrotha.

The coverdisc ISO was duff. I grabbed a Slackware 8.1 CD from Cheeplinux and it installed fine.

Now the real fun begins!

Cheers.