Sorry in advance for being a noob and asking these questions.

1. I've just downloaded the iso and burned slackware 9 onto a cd, but when I restrart my computer and try to boot the cd, it goes to windows xp instead. How can I get it to load the cd? I already went into the bios menu and change it so it will load the cd.

2. I've got a harddrive, and it has sub partitions on it. If I did the fdisk stuff under linux, would it format all the data on the harddrive? Because I can only seem to have 1 primary.

you should select the burn image option in the cd burner software, i think you dragged the whole file into the cd burner software, you cant do that.


using fdisk you can select the partitions you want to format. you can do all with fdisk. create, delete format, resize everything

no, I burned the iso correctly. I used nero, click on burn image, selected the slackware iso and burned it.

well if you burned the image then maybe your bios doesnt have the cd boot facility. it is has it then maybe the cd is corrupted. if it is not then it beats me.

you can always make a boot floppy, boot from it and then start the installation by pointing to the cd rom

1. Do you get a message on bootup saying something like, "Attempting to boot from ATAPI CDROM: FAILED," or does it just boot to XP? If you get that message, then there is either something wrong with the CD, or your drive is having a problem reading it correctly. Can you see the files on the CD in Windows? You should be able to. If you don't get that message and you can see the files on the CD, then perhaps for some reason your computer is still not really trying to boot from the CD. Some BIOSes have a Boot Device Security (or something like that) setting that has to be set to enable booting from the CDROM as well as a Boot Order setting that needs to be set to try the CDROM before the hard drive.

2. You can have either up to three primary partitions and several logical partiions (I can't remember the maximum number of logical partitions offhand, but it's more than you'd ever want), or you can have up to four primary partitions with no logical partitions on a PC hard drive. (This is because logical partitions live inside a primary partition, but once you add a logical partition, you can't use that primary partition for anything but logical partitions.)

Your stumbling block is likely that you already have logical partitions that you want to keep. When these partitions were made, all the space that was left on the disk was used for the primary partition that they reside in. You would not be able to add another primary partition until you deleted all of your logical partitions, so you would lose the data in them. There is good news, however: Linux doesn't care if it's put on primary or logical partitions, so as long as you have enough free space on your drive, you don't need to delete any partitions. Just use cfdisk to make more logical partitions in your free space for Linux: one for a swap partition and at least one more for everything else.

As a side note, DOS and DOS based systems (Win95, 98, ME) could only access one primary partition on a hard drive. So, although you could have more primary partitions on your drive while running those systems, they would only be able to access the first one.

There is an issue with the CD boot process which causes problems with some BIOSes, so you'll need to create a boot floppy and start the install from that. I think it's all covered in the slack documentation.

If you had a BIOS that didn't like Syslinux, then your machine would probably hang on boot if you tried to boot from the CD rather than booting to WinXP. In any case, you should at least see an attempt to boot the CD if that were the problem.

I tried creating a boot disk, but when I use rawritexp to create one for install.1 and install.2, it won't write any data.

i just did a post over in the general section very detailed w/ nero. check it make sure u followed those steps. because i got mine to boot after sum struggle. however i have a machine dedicated to linux so i could careless about the current data or partitions.

Does the winxp boot?

I'd like to echo Rodrin's suggestion: On a lot of computers, the BIOS is set up to boot from the hard drive BEFORE the CDROM. If that is the case on your machine (it was on a couple of mine), then you'll never be able to boot from CD until you change it. Get into your BIOS and check the boot order.