I'm trying to put Slack 8.1 on an old (6 years!) Compaq with a 100Mhz (ooh so fast ) and a 1 GB HD...like the title says, a paperweight. Needless to say, it won't boot from the CD, so I have to use boot disks. I got interesting in Slack by a book I bought at a Hafl Price Books store with a copy of Slack included (7.0 I think). I tried installing that on the aforementioned paperweight to somewhat less than spectacular results. Many packages (including basics like gcc) simply failed to install....during the install process errors would come up saying "gcc.tar.gz is not in tar.gz format" and stuff like that....I made the boot disks from the CD (rawrite refused to work btw and I had to use some arcane command on my -much newer- Red Hat box) and followed exactly what the book said so I don't know what caused that....I assumed that since the book was from 99 that it may have simply been due to the fact that linux wasn't as easy to install then as it is now (well relatively anyway). So, I decided to try Slack 8.1....so I downloaded the iso and made a CD of the image. I didn't check the checksums because frankly I don't know how and didn't think it would be necessary. Anyway...I used the same boot and root disks I made with the older CD and went through the whole setup process (up to the actual install) before it told me that it couldn't find the CD at the mount point (/mnt/log/slackware or something like that)...so I switched into another session via ctrl-alt-F2, logged in and checked that directory to find everything there, perfectly neat and readable....so why can't it be found????? I tried to find information on making new boot disks from the 8.1 CD but had no luck there and I even tried making some from the ones from the ftp site using a new version of rawrite but those gave the same result....I've seen somewhere something about there being 5 root disks for installing or something now but I'm getting tired of digging through somewhat similar but never exactly the same problems looking for things that might help or might just waste another 3 hours of my life. I tried to get help on IRC and they suggested I try a different distro to see it if might not be a hardware problem...I installed Red Hat 7.1, and after a little bit of frustration trying to trim things down to fit on the 1 GB HD and still keep the essentials, it is installed and works well...if however EXTREMELY slowly...but the slowness is expected.

So it seems that Red Hat runs fine but Slack won't install...I even tried to put the older Slack back on that computer (even with the messed up gcc an other stuff) and I got that same cannot locate /mnt/log/slackware type message...i tired it several more times an one time it worked, though I don't know why. While I can't be sure that I made the 8.1 ISO perfectly or the boot disks for that matter, I have given quite a bit of effort to this and I don't know what else to try. I could try making more disks and checking the checksum and other things but I'm tired and fed up with false starts and getting nowhere. I know Linux sometimes takes some work and a little hacking...but I'd like to have something working so I can begin to hack at that rather than being completely lost before I can even start. This is part question and part rant about Slack install troubles so I hope you can help me with the former and for the most part ignore the latter.

Thanks

Maybe you need to use one of the alternate boot images like the "lowmem.i" one for a floppy boot? Does the rescue disk work? (Or did the book only come with one CD?

Anyway, I used 7.0 CDs very successfully on my 2.1G hardrive, 200MMX, 64M RAM, VX97, circa 1997 computer [BIOS flash upgraded now]. (Installed in < one hour without configuring X.) This isn't very helpful, but I know that installing 7.0 is a piece of cake, even with bad hardware. Did you check to see if there is a BIOS upgrade for your motherboard? Will it allow changing the BIOS to boot from CD? You probably need an alternate boot/root disk. Maybe that CD is bad?

I had problems booting the official 8.0 CD (possibly due to a bug in that version of the isolinux installer), but I still use the 7.0 rescue disk to boot in emergencies and correct problems (just mount the object partition r/w and use full pathnames when giving commands and fixing LILO, etc.).

A bit off topic, but I am suggesting that problem is not really with Slackware version 7.0 at all.

BTW, I think there is a text-only boot/root disk too. (You weren't thinking about X, right? ;)

You are probably right...I was leaning toward it being the boot disks or hardware (who knows whats in this piece of junk (though I guess i could venture a look-see)). The thing thats been frustrating me is that I don't have someone here to help when I hit a dead end. I don't know enough yet to really troubleshoot anything and I when I hit a wall, I have to start over from square one no matter how simple the problem may be. Not to mention the fact that many times i don't have any idea how to describe the problem in order to get help!

I was thinking about X but the book has stuff about configuring all of that so i thought i would go through the process of learning that. I have Red Hat 7.1 up and running fine on my main box...this slackware thing is so I can play around and learn without worring about messing up my main system I work on every day. I am a bit wary about the quality of the CD as I have been burned by software included with books before but the problem probably lies elsewhere. Perhaps I'll try lowmem.i next...making the boot disks was such a hassle (since rawrite from the CD refused to work on win2k) that I didn't look into trying different ones. I did upgrade the RAM in that box oh so long ago to (i believe) 72MB but i had to remove the other sticks because they were faulty for some reason and I may be down to just 8 MB though the memory check at startup reads 64MB. This computer is rather old (possibly 1996 at the latest) so i don't know if I can even upgrade the bios at all.

Thanks for your help and I look forward to trying that out when I get some time and to hearing from anyone else who has any suggestions.

I've installed Slack 8.1 twice now from floppies on one older anti-cdrom boxen and another which just ignored the cdrom on spin up, a common problem now that slack moved to the isolinux boot method from the old 2.8 eltorito method.

Get the bare.i boot disk from here.
Copy it to the floppy on the RH machine with:
dd if=bare.i of=/dev/fd0

Get the 5, yes five! rootdisks from here, labelled install.1, install.2, install.3, yadyadya and copy them with the same dd command. Don't use the disk if the dd doesn't report the same number of records in and out. Just chuck the disk and try another. If you don't have 6, you can do what I did and just make the first 3, start loading them and as you're prompted for more, copy over the old ones.

You'll need lowmem.i as a boot kernel if you have less than 16Mb of RAM. I got it to install on a laptop with 24 just fine.

Cheers,

Finegan

Try to find a BIOS upgrade at your motherboard manufacturer's site [you might actually have to rumage their ftp site rather than seeking from their main HTTP site - due to age]. I found one for my computer, which is circa 1996-97 [purchased Spring '97]. (And I could not easily find it by searching their WEB site.)

IT WORKED!!!! thanks guys!

I made the bare.i boot disk and the 5 install.# root disks and Slack 8.1 installed flawlessly and I didn't have to micromanage the install packages like I did with Red Hat (with a 1.2 GB HD you have to leave stuff out after alll ). I may look for that BIOS upgrade as well but I really don't need it at this point.

Now all I have to do is configure X for the fist time ever along with all the other things I don't yet know about! Now I can actually get started on learning Linux!!

Thanks!