I am trying to install slackware...version 8 i believe........and i downloaded the official slackware book from the slackware website to guide me through the install. I used fdisk to make my partitions...one for root and one for swap...as the book recommends for beginners and then proceeded with the setup menu
I specified my source and target and all that...then i checked which packages to install and chose full install and when it started to install....it gave me a message...something similar to....

source not mounted on /var/log/mount slackware.......something similar to that......i cant reproduce the error message because i would have to erase my redhat partition again and well you get the picture.........

so thats the message.....

source not mounted on /var/log/mount slackware

do i need to mount the source here or what...
any ideas....your help for this newbie would be much helpful.

The setup program should have propmted for each of the steps in sequence once you chose from the menu where to start. One of the items was locating the source to install from, where you would choose a Slackware CD. The program would then offer to search for and locate the CD. You can manually mount the CD on the mount point /cdrom or /var/log/mount, and then run setup; selecting the option for the CD is mounted. You can mount the CD manually by:

mount /dev/hdd /cdrom (or /var/log/mount)

Note: use the proper drive designation above for hdd for the CD drive.

Once it is mounted you can verify the slackware packages by,

cd /cdrom/slackware
md5sum --check CHEKSUMS.md5

If it reports that the files for "kdei" directory is missing for Slack 8.1 then it is OK. All other files should check OK. If not then the CD is corrupted and needs to be recreated.

Also, during the setup program you can switch to a second console by pressing [ALT][F2] or [F3], etc. through [F6]. During the install switch to aother console and verify if the CD is mounted using the mount command. You can also use the "dmesg" command to view any errors that might be reported during the install from another console as well.

Hope it helps, sure don't want you reinstalling RedHat again. But if you have the disk space, then you could consider allocating a section at the end for the RedHat system. Slack uses about 2 GByte for a full install. So you would want to allow at least 4 GByte if you have the space available.

okay i took your advice Excalibur.......
i mounted the slackware disk on /cdrom with the command mount /dev/hdd /cdrom and specified in the setup menu that this is where the cd is mounted......./cdrom
it said it was installing packages and i was all smiles...UNTIL..10 seconds later it said it was done and to press ctrl+alt+del to restart the system.....but after 10 seconds!!.....to install all the packages..2 GB worth....i was extremely skeptical.......so i restarted and it brought me to GRUB. The command line version of GRUB. I have no idea if it actually did install and i just dont know what commands to pass to GRUB. From what i read, there should be a menu of sorts notifying you of the packages being installed and then it would continue with more setup and configuration options.....
im going to to do the checksums to make sure the cd is not corrupt like you suggested...if its not...its back to the drawing board.

Slack doesn't use the grub boot loader. Slack uses the lilo boot loader. If grub is booting then it is left over from the prior system because lilo was not installed. I know systems have advanced, but 10 seconds for 2 GByte is really hard to believe as well. My systems usually take about 30 minutes to do a full install. Thats why I do full installs, less time than going through the menu and choosing packages. And you can't use menus and leave it unattended.

Did the dmesg command report any error messages?