installing slack on old cd
 

i want to install slackware on an old laptop (very old) with 16 megs of ram. the cd is an old scsi and it will not boot. i tried the floppy disks with teh scsi support but nothing recognised my cdrom. can i install it will out a cdrom? or get a different distro? all i need is X, fluxbox, and mozilla.slack-get is too slow
any ideas?

***sorry the last line is an error

A couple of questions. How large is your hard drive on the laptop? (Guessing that it may not be much over a couple of Gigs.) If you have the room, create a MS-DOS parition and copy the slackware directories to that and then boot off of the floppy and select install from HD....

Second question, do you have another PC locally networked? If so, you could boot from a (slackware install) floppy, add in the networking (via floppy, read the install documentation on the CD for a step-by-step) and then do a network install.

(My email/web/file server is a Pentium-133MHz, 16 Megs of ram and 5 Gig hd, on an 8 year old laptop.)

i have 1 gig of space which i think is enough. it has no network card and only isa slots, and i only have pci eth cards. it was running 98 so i assume the win98 boot will recognize the cdrom. it is a old scsi setup and win98 used to ask me when i booted if i wanted the cdrom support so i hope its nothing too specialized for the bootdisk. ill post back when i try to teh 98 boot. thanks

I would try and boot the machine with a boot manager floppy like this one:

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

And use that to boot up the Slackware CD-ROM from your SCSI drive.

is it possible to boot off a win98 disk then boot the slackware cd? teh win98 supports the cdrom.

i tried the smart boot manager but it did not recognise the cdrom. i was wrong i only have 450 megs on my drive. i tried teh adaptec boot disk withteh slackware but it did not work either any more idea???? the win98 can recognise the cdrom so i think i should be able to boot it somehow.

How do you know that the Windows boot disk recognizes the CD-ROM? Just because Windows 98 was installed on it does't mean it was installed through the CD-ROM, it was most likely installed to the HDD before it was ever put into the laptop.

Win98 has the PCMCIA interface drivers and the PCMCIA CDROM interface drivers on it. If you can boot up with the win98 install diskette, and play around with getting the CDRom usable under 2in98, co copy over the slackware directories a, ap, l, and n, then you will have a basic set of files to install.

Next, you need to make a Slackware boot diskette and a root diskette. It is from these that you will have to boot Slackware. Once you have booted the system into linux, then you could proceed with the install, using your VFAT DOS partition as the source of your Slackware install files.

If, on the other hand, you make a Slackware boot diskette and a root diskette, follow the instructions found on the CDs about using PCMCIA and SCSI booting. Note that you will probably need both, and you need to load PCMCIA before the SCSI. If you get both of these done, you should see the CDROM from your install boot and you can then repartition the entire hard drive for Slackware, if you wish.

i am trying the winp8 copy over to fat now, but as far as the pcmcia solution, my cdrom is internally connected to a scsi directly to the mobo (it is one of the first laptops ever made) so is your suggestion about pcmcia then scsi still applicable???

reply to MS3FGX: when i boot off teh win98 disk i can read files from the cdrom

I believe so. I really can not say with 100% certainty. I have not run across a hardware configuration like yours. But it is worth a try. If this does not work, then try the alternate suggestion of copying the base files into the win98/FAT partition and booting off of a boot & root floppies and then install via hard drive (vs. CDROM). Once you have the base installation, you can boot into Linux and get the rest of your installation from the CD (as you should have scsi driverr installed, by then)

At some point you might want to look into installing from the serial port.

It would be agonizingly slow, but it works.

And have you thought about pulling that drive out, putting it into a more standard configured system, and installing Linux on it that way? When you put the drive back in, it shouldn't be to hard to reconfigure it for the new hardware (assuming you use the generic kernel).