Hello.

I'm trying to install slackware 10.2 on a machine that already has windows XP, Suse 10.2 and Suse 9.3 (actually I want to replace Suse 9.3 with slack). I boot from the first slack CD, login as root, run setup and a screen pops up that warns me "NO LINUX PARTITIONS DETECTED". I then run fdisk and get the error message "Unable to open /dev/sda". If I run fdisk from my suse distro, I get the following:

# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4903 39383316 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 4904 30401 204812685 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 4904 17652 102406311 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 17653 22753 40973751 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7 22754 22945 1542208+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 22946 26575 29157943+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 26576 28105 12289693+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 28106 30401 18442588+ 83 Linux

Any help is appreciated.

You may be using SATA HD, so when you have the prompt after booting from the first CD, please type in a kernel that support SATA HD (for example if I remember well type in: sata.i).

If you don't type in a kernel, you'll boot with bare.i kernel. This is a bare IDE kernel and I guess it doesn't support SATA HD.

Don't forget to create your partitions with fdisk or cfdisk before running setup. Slackware setup formats and assigns mount points to partitions, it does not create them.

gegechris99, your post solved my problem. Thank you very much. I've been banging my head over this for the last couple of days. Eternal_Newbie, thanks for the useful piece of info.