Ok so I am trying to get slackware on an old 486 I got from an office mate.

486 DX 33 16M RAM 1G HD

NO CD drive

ISA Ethernet Card

But WHY you might ask?

Just so I can say I did it.

I am pretty much a newbie at *NIX Installs though i do use Solaris at work.

So anyways I created a bootdisk ( I used net.i) and a root disk, but when I boot with the bootdisk in the drive it goes throuhg the memory check and just hangs there spinning with the BIOS info, the memory info, a few blank lines, and the letters LI on the screen. Forever.

I created the disks under windows using RAWRITE.

BTW LOVE the motto for this site!

I guess the first question is, will it boot from bare.i or a DOS boot floppy?
Does it boot from the hard drive?

You'll need 3 disks, possibly 4 to boot and start the Slackware 10 installion from floppies.

First you'll need a bootdisk with a kernel to get booted up. With such a limited amount of resources on that PC, I'd suggest the lowmem.i image located in the bootdisk directory. You'll probably want to customize your kernel once you're up and running though. See the README in that folder. This is the disk that you'll boot the PC with. It will then request the below disks once the kernel is up and running.

Second you'll need to create the 2 installion disks. These are located in the rootdisk directory and named install.1 and install.2. If you plan on installing over a network, then you'll probably need a network disk as well, ie network.dsk.

You could host the CDs on another PC on the network and do an NFS install. The Slackware installion may also support other sources like ftp and http, can't remember. Else if you have enough hard disk space, you could set up a parition on it and then copy the files to it while connected to another PC. Then install the hard drive in the 486 and point the slackware installion to that for the install. You could then reclaim the parition latter on after you have it up and going.

Anyway, installing on old hardware like this can be a challenge at times, but Slackware is well suited to it. With a bit of luck, some reading and maybe a little troubleshooting you should be able to get it going. Good luck.

PS...Reading what you described above again, it sounds as if it's not getting out of the intial checks the BIOS does. If that's the case, then you may have some bad ram or some other issue that will need working out first. Maybe poke around in the BIOS a bit.

Ive caved in and have decided to take the HD out and boot up with the HD in my other machine and a slackware CD in the CD drive.

I think the boot sector on the HD is bad.