Hi everyone,

Brand new to linux. Was up until 6 am trying to get the thing to work... no luck.

I don't really know what is wrong.. probably several things.

System info:
Compaq presario
AMD K6 533MHz
256 MB
15 G hard drive (eide?)


Loaded slackware 10.2 from iso disk 1 & 2. While trying to boot it hangs at the point where "configure ethernet adapter" is mentioned.

During setup I entered in info to setup a LAN (it is not physically plugged in right now). If important it is entered like this:

- IP address: 10.10.10.15
- subnet: 255.255.0.0
- gateway: 10.10.10.1
- name server: 10.10.10.1

I also believe I messed up the partitioning. I was following the directions located at sourceforge for the astguiclient - astguiclient .sourceforge. net/scratch_install . html

and when unable to follow them exactly went off on my own (a dark shadow flew over me when I did this...) I knew I was probably in for trouble, but doggedly continued on.

I was unable to call up xfdisk as suggested in the instrux. Instead I used the Ranish Partition manager.

Partitions currently look like this:
# - Type - File Sys type - Strting ending - Partition Size

0 - MBR - Master Boot Record - 0,0,1 - 0,0,1 - 0

1 - Pri - Unused - 0,0,2 - 0,0,63 - 31

2 - Pri - Linux ext2fs - 0,1,1 - 1454,63,63 - 10,994,224

3 - Pri - Linux swap - 1454,64,1 - 1939,239,63, - 3,672,144

4 - Pri - Unused - 1940,0,1 - 1940,63,63 - 2,016

Master Boot Record shows the following:
MBR Executable code: unknown IPL
Boot Interface type: compact
Check viruses: Yes
Boot prompt timeout: 6
Default boot choice: not set

When I get out of the Ranish Partition Manager is says:
"There is no active partition on this disk!"

That doesn't sound good.

I've spent hours on researching this, just didn't find anything to steer me in the right direction.

At this point I don't even know how to start back from scratch even if it is necessary.

Please help.

Thanks in advance,

Dave

Also, forgot to mention that there is no MS windows os installed on this system...

So that's very good that there is no Windows. It won't disturb you then. Use installation howto at http://www.slackbasics.org, not an astguiclient!

Are you saying that starting over from scratch is the best option at this point?

Cheers,

Dave

If Slackware is working, there is no need. Otherwise - yes. And install lilo to mbr to avoid other troubles. Firstly, you may need to disable check viruses option in bios.

Funny thing about the check virus option in the bios, it never complains if the default OS in the MBR is DOS/NT. It only complains if it is a *nix loader, like lilo or a *BSD loader, well at least for me it does, and so I disabled it, I wonder just how "useful" this feature of the bios is anyways.

Thanks for the responses!