I've been trying to setup my comp for a dual boot with winxp and slack 9. I reinstalled windows (reformatting my hd) and left about 10gigs of my 60gig hd for the slack partition.

The problem I have is that after I boot the cd, choose a kernel (bare.i), and have it load, the screen goes black and nothing happens. Originally I thought that it was still loading, but the hd light was not on and the cd wasn't in use. I left it in this state for about 10 minutes to be sure, but nothing happened. I've tried booting from the cd and from a boot disk, both yielding the same results. Any help you guys can give me would be appreciated greatly. Thanks in advance.

NN

You didn't give any info for us to use.

How to get good answers with your questions about Linux

The Official Guide To Slackware Linux

Sorry, but I'm not sure what info you are asking for. If you can tell me what you need I would be glad to post it for you. I apologize for my newbish ways.

NN

When the


boot:

prompt appears press enter and see what happends

I was never able to boot successfully from my Slack CD either. Instead, I solved the problem by booting from floppies. You'll need the boot floppy as well as the 2 root floppies, and that should get you going. Start with the boot, then just follow the instructions shown on screen. The Slack installation process itself is pretty streamlined and doesn't take long. The only piece of advice I'd have would just be to do any partitioning work ahead of time, that way you'll be able to just focus on the actual installation. -- J.W.

Ok, let me try and clarify my situation a bit. Here is what happens:

- I put in the Slackware 9 cd that I burnt from an iso.
- I restart comp and boot from the cd.
- "Welcome to Slackware 9.0 Linux yada yada parameters yada" appears. I push enter at boot: prompt to choose bare.i for my kernel.
- A few files load
- Blank black screen appears. Nothing happens. Pushing keys does nothing. HD and CDROM appear to be inactive. I eventually have to power off and restart.

Hopefully this makes things a little clearer. Please let me know if I can give you any more information. Thanks.

Make sure you have read and followed the pre-installation howto or the docs for your release version to make sure your hardware is supported by Linux.

Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO

Have you attempted any other installation methods other than CDROM?

In your BIOS, ensure that plug-and-pray is disabled.

Check if the cd has a problem. Maybe is not fully written. Some times it shows that it is (showing the right size in MB) but it is not. Try tou find another
cd if you can and try it again.

How To Check MD5sums On A Linux Iso Image
# Cheap CDs
Discount Linux CDs
Linux Central
Cheapbytes
TuxCDs
ComputerHelperGuy

I tried using a boot disk but I got the same results (blank screen and all). I also checked the md5sum and everything was fine. I have actually burnt two boot cds, each iso from a different source, so I'm pretty sure the problem does not lie in the cd. Plug and play WAS enabled in the bios, but turning this off still did not fix the problem.

My system, if it helps at all:
p4 1.9ghz
Asus p4t-e mobo
toshiba 16x dvd-rom
512mb ram
Umm, can't thing of anything else that might be relevent.

Thanks to everyone who has replied so far. I really want to get slack installed, so any other ideas would be great.

Ok, I tried using the lowmem.i kernel on a boot disk and I didn't get a blank screen after the kernel loaded, so it appears to work. Are there any drawbacks to using the lowmem.i kernel and is there a reason that it is the only one that I can get to work?

Leave the CD in and let it boot, at the "boot:" type "bare.i root=/dev/hd? noinitrd ro"

This should boot you "login".

Once you login run "liloconfig" and select "expert" then it will allow you to choose how the system boots. When asked "where do you want to install lilo" be sure to answer "MBR" it will tell you it is possibly unsafe. It's not. Also prior to setting the installation destination you will want to specify how long you want it to wait, name of partition (one word nospaces), etc.

The key thing to specify when configuring lilo is the /boot partition and the /root partition

I hope this helped a little.

Do I have to replace the ? in hd? with anything?

Replace it with the number for your root partition. so if your root partion is hda1 you would put /dev/hda1.

Labr@:
Tried using "bare.i root=/dev/hda2 noinitrd ro" and booting from the cd, but it still hangs up right after the bare.i kernel loads. I WAS able to install slackware with the lowmem.i kernel, though.

Can anyone tell me why the lowmem.i kernel works while bare.i doesn't? What extra work will I have to do to get my Slackware install with lowmem.i up to par with bare.i (assuming there is a difference). Thanks.