slackware 8.1 - booting and installation
 

I'm having problems installing slackware 8.1...

The problem being the old pentium 200 i'm installing on will not boot from C.D....


anyway.... i downloaded rawrite, (all versions- lol!) compiled a boot disk using the bare.i image, booted it up and.....

Intel pentium with F0 0F bug-
workaround enabled.

CPU: Intel Pentium MMX stepping 03

Checking 'hlt' instruction...

and then it hangs!

I wish to be able to get past this stage so as i can select my CDROM drive and boot the 8.1 installation....

i can't download a newer ISO, as i have a restriction on such at my university.

nor do I know much at all about linux, im going to try other images to use with rawrite, as i suspect that the cdrom drive is also a weird one, IDE though.

my intention is to get a bare-ish install with apache, as this will enable me to test my website (original intention).

the system is an old pentium 200 MMX
1.5 gb IDE HDD
24 mb ram
cdrom 4x - think its a weird one

could someone also tell me how to detect drives on the system from a properly booted computer? (managed to work the disk setup on my older pentium 100 laptop). i.e what would my cdrom drive be named?

dev/cdrom?

i want to be able to boot the disk on the p200, access the cd on it after loading the ramdisk steps 1-5, install the standard kernel then play with getting apache on it.

is this simple? - im not expecting an easy ride... just a good bit of advice to get me started

a link to a complete 8.1 manual in pdf would be good too!

The Slackware 8.1 install ISO is the latest stable release. It requires 6 floppy disks; 1 boot disk and 5 root disks. These can be downloaded from slackware-8.1 tree in the bootdisks and rootdisks directory. I normally recommend a package call Smart Boot Manager to boot a floppy and allow the CD to boot the ISO. However, If you CD is unusual IDE type, and not ATAPI IDE then it probably will not detect it. But if you wanted to try it; http://btmgr.sourceforge.net.

Upon completeion of the boot disk kernel booting it should prompt for the next diskette until the remaining 5 disks have been read. But your post would indicate that the kernel is not booting properly. I think the next step on the kernel would be to detect the memory and could be hanging up there. So you could try running a program called memtest86 to check the RAM. http://www.memtest86.com

And welcome to LQ.