you must run cfdisk set up your hard drive and swap file. If you do not do that slackware will not proceed to install. run the cfdisk tool make your partitions then slackware will start the set up.
Oh my all this because you have unformulated hard drives.

TinyCore runs in ram that is why you could see your old drives most likely windows partitions.
does not mater what distro if you do not format your drives they will never be seen to install on.

Where's pci_ide?!
 

Well, just for grins I downloaded the latest stable kernel source and so far I haven't found a single file called pci_ide so I hope I'll find it once 13.1 finishes installing (did like you suggested, but I'm running out blank CDs and they cost a fortune here in Canada - I wish my old computer was new enough to have a DVD drive).

Thanks. In case that doesn't work though I've opened a great bottle of red wine to drown my troubles in - our celebrate with!

Tiny Core: the good thing in small packages
 

Tiny Core runs mostly in RAM, but it has to load from somewhere! And if you install it on a hard drive you can configure persistent storage (for /opt and /home typically) rather than backup-at-shutdown (like you would if running off a pendrive); and the extensions are looped in so they're being read off the physical medium they're stored on.

The only reason I'm not using TC on that old laptop is I just figured it would be easier to have one distro to serve them all and in the network bind them (you can blame that last abuse of classic literature on the cocktail of Advil and red wine I've consumed this evening :)

But if alekow's suggestion doesn't work I think I'm going to with TC and that's it!

Thanks,

I forgot about that - you should probably turn off smp in your kernel.

Here's the driver

And you'll also nedd those:
Also take a look at /extra/linux-2.6.33.4-nosmp-sdk/ directory in slackware-13.1 source tree.

This is getting complicated
 

So are those options I'll find when configuring a kernel build? In menuconfig or elsewhere?

I found the string PCI_IDE in the file /drivers/ide/ide-pci-generic.c but I'm trying to find a good tutorial on how to compile a module, or even compile myself a custom kernel with everything built-in that my machine needs (and nothing it doesn't).

Is there some dependancy checking going on? So if I say make ide-pci-generic will it also make the modules it depends on? I looked at a kernel config file and I could not find anything that I thought would let me build that driver into a custom kernel.

I guess I better stop at the liquor store, I'm going to need a lot more red wine to complete this little project!

Thanks for all your help so far, I wouldn't still be doing this without it.

Sorry, i feel my posts are a bit chaotic.

1)
I forgot that there's a generic-non-smp kernel package (kernel-generic-2.6.33.4-i486-1.txz) which you'll need - install it.

2)
You can find there 3 things: a package with non-smp kernel-headers - you'll need it too, a patch file and a README file.

3)
After patching your kernel-source run make menuconfig [EDIT]and load generic-non-smp kernel config found in /boot[/EDIT] and find those:

You can see that i changed most of asterisks to 'M' letters - It should be like this - compile them as modules

4) Run 'make' and 'make modules_install' (This should work - if so, you won't have to recompile whole kernel)

5) Read the /boot/README.initrd
6) Make an initrd with your filesystem support and your IDE module (ide_pci_generic?) [EDIT2] but I don't think this one is really needed - just use your filesystem module [/EDIT2] and modify lilo.conf (not forgetting to run 'lilo' command after that)

And i guess it's enough... if i didn't miss anything ;-)

Merry Christmas! :-)

EDIT:
Hope you've seen the edited part:-)