Slack 9.0, not slack current. He hasn't tried slack 8 yet. I gave him the link to the forum after I had already started this thread, but I can encourage him to post if it would help.

slight

Try reburning the slackware 9 iso at the slowest speed your burner will allow. This solved similar problems for me.

I've got 2 machines (both desktops) and with one machine (the one I built myself) I was able to easily boot using the Slack CD I burned, no hassles. On the other machine (the Dell), the *same* CD just would not boot no matter what I did. So, I instead went the floppy route, which actually needs 3 floppies (a boot disk such as bare.i and 2 root disks, install.1 and install.2)

I believe the "LIL" error indicates either a geometry problem *or* a media failure, so perhaps it's not the CD that's bad, it may be the floppy. Just a thought, but perhaps you might create a new floppy. Last comment: when I was installing Slack, I wasn't sure which RAWRITE version I should use to create a usable bare.i disk. The first one I tried (plain RAWRITE) seemed to be OK but it wouldn't boot up, so I tried a different version (RAWRITEXP) which also didn't work, but then finally some other one (13, I think) did do the trick. My point is that it might be worth creating a variety of bare.i floppies, each using a different version of RAWRITE. I can't guarantee that it will solve the problem but you might want to give it a try. -- J.W.

I believe that J.W. is correct about there being a problem with the set of floppies, or at least the boot floppy, that was spoken about in the initial post. However, I also believe that the CDROM disc is unreadable in this machine's CD drive. So even if the person trying to do the install got the boot floppies working correctly, it wouldn't help him because he would not be able to read the installation media. If the computer can't properly read the files on the disc from Windows or DOS, then there is a problem with the disc regardless of whether the boot floppies work.

True. But then the CDROM of the laptop in question *is* picking up on other CDs (in Windows). So I personally would go out and buy me some brand new floppies. RAWRITE bare.i, install.1, and install.2 onto them, buy a set of brand new empty CDs as well, and burn Slackware 9.0 onto that (from a trustworth ftp site... preferrably one mentioned on the slackware site itself). The problem really just sounds like a shitty CD-problem to me.



-zsejk

0xAA error in SBM? That's because the CDRom drives you're trying to boot from can't read CDR (burned CDs). You have to upgrade the CDRom drive, or install from network (it's possible with Debian, but I never tried it with Slack).

i get the same 'Disk Error 0xAA' message from SBM when trying to boot both a home burnt CDR and glass mastered 'official' CD's .
Also the CD rom behaves fine in windows 95 (it came with it) and i can see the contents of both discs with
not problems.

The system i am using is a Dell Latitude XPi CD P150ST
http://support.jp.dell.com/docs/systems/ptcd/Specs.htm

I suspect it uses a non standard IO Port or the CDdrive needs more initialisation,
although looking at the dmesg output from other users with the same laptop they look standard .

I tried vpart and that said it didn't support this system when i tried to boot from cd.

I'm going to have to plug the hard drive in to my desktop and do it that way.

Toodle-pip
Amias