I want to install slackware 8.1 on my laptop which is a compaq LTE 5400..specs are pentium 150MHz, 80MB RAM, 1 meg video, 2gig HD...blah blah...junky machine that is running mandrake now.

Anyways this is my problem...The floppy drive and CD drive use the same bay, and only one can be in there at a time. When I install mandrake..redhat..whatever this is what I do. I boot with the boot disk and just as it finishes with the floppy I put the laptop in sleep mode then switch the floppy drive with the CD drive and linux doesn't suspect a thing and it finds the CD and no problem. The touble is that with slackware it wont let me put the computer to sleep for some reason and instead of booting off one floppy it has one boot disk and a bunch of RAM disk floppies and it never finds the CD.

I just want to know if there is a way to use one floppy and then let it use the CD like i do with other distros. i tried coping the CD to a FAT partition then told the install to look for it there but it never found it, that too is an option if i could get it to work.

oh yeah....the cd rom drive isn't bootable

ok that's it. thanks for the help

You might to want to have alook at Smart Boot Manager. At first I didn't think it would work for you because the CD and FDD are not installed at boot time. However, If you install it to the hard disk and leave the CDROM installed it might allow it to boot the CD. My notebook does not support bootable CD either, but Smart Boot Manager allows me to boot floppy, CD. Win partition or Linux. (Of course, Slackware is the default you know!)

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net

Hope it works for you.

that worked, thanks for the help.