"No active partition" in Slack
 

I downloaded Slack 11 isos, checked the md5sum, and burned them with infrarecorder (I'm currently stuck in Windoze). What do I do? I burned them at 6x. All I get is the above title in white letters with red highlight.

Hi,

You are booting the Slackware install cd1, right? What kernel are you using to boot?

Give us some hardware details for your system. You could use the huge26 or test26 kernel to boot the install cd instead of the default. Read the RELEASE NOTE for Slackware 11.

OK. The kernel is...whatever the CD's default is. I just stuck it in and rebooted. I have never had to go through and select which kernel I want. Besides, it doesn't give me any options whatsoever as far as what kernel, it just says "No active partition".

I have a Compaq Presario a1410y. 80gb HDD, Lightscribe DVD/CD writer, 1 gig RAM, Celeron D 3.333GHz.

I wonder if I should try to install Slack 10.2...

I take it know one really knows...it could just be a burning problem. Does anybody know about a Slack based distro that you can install? (preferably not Zenwalk)

Is it possible to install Slax?

No idea what's wrong there. You should get a welcome screen, and a boot prompt, with instructions to press F2 & F3 for a choice of kernels to enter at the boot prompt.

I would say that the hard drive does not contain any partitions or a valid partition table and the BIOS is not configured to boot from CD first. If the BIOS is configured to boot from CD first then the disk may not of been burned correctly.

I partitioned everything using GParted, 1.5 gig swap, 75 (give or take) ext3 for the rest of the drive.

Did you set the / boot partition flag active?

Uh...how do you do that in GParted?

You could have done the partitioning during installation using cfdisk.

no, I couldn't. I never got that far. And cfdisk doesnt work on my 10.2 discs.

I mean before you used GParted, when you had unallocated space.

So what do I do now?

Delete the partitions you made with GParted, boot up from Slackware CD1, after it's asked you to log in as root, use cfdisk to make partitions, quit cfdisk and enter "setup" at the prompt (without quotes). Hope this works out OK.

Nobody asked yet... but did you burn the ISO file as an image? Or do you now have 6 CD's each with a single file "slackware....iso" showing up in a directory listing when you open the CD content in Windows Explorer?

The error "no active partition" sounds like the CD is not bootable at all which would indicate the above mistake.

Eric