I've been trying to install Zipslack on an old Toshiba laptop. The laptop has a 486/50 processor, 28 Meg of RAM, and a 350 Meg hard drive. The laptop runs Windows 3.1 and the associated version of MS-DOS, and the drive is appropriately formatted (FAT16).



I downloaded the latest (Sept 03) Zipslack, unzipped it on a Windows XP machine, and copied it to a Zip disk. I temporarily attached a parallel port Zip drive to the laptop and copied the files to the hard drive.



I inadvertently started the system at first using the linux.bat line for the Zip drive, and it worked, so I know it can work with the processor, memory, and I/O devices (which include a 3-Com modem/NIC PCMCIA card.



However, I have not been able to get the system to start from /dev/hda1. (I can't use the Zip drive regularly because I need it for something else.) I've tried a lot of things and looked in a lot of places.



I first tried to start it with the linux.bat line for /dev/hda1 and got a lot of messages that it couldn't execute /sbin/agetty, followed by a stall of the system. I then cleared the Zip drive and recopied the system from the original. I tried to copy just a fresh /etc and /var from the Zip drive to the laptop hard drive. When I tried to start, I got messages that it couldn't execute rc.K and rc.M.



I then cleared and reloaded a completely fresh system on the laptop and have gotten back to getting "can't execute /sbin/agetty" messages.



I created a rescue disk, mounted /dev/hda1 with -t umsdos and looked for ownership and permission problems among the files on /dev/hda1 but couldn't find any. I also edited /etc/fstab to replace the line for /dev/fd2 with a line for /dev/hda1 mounted as / with file system umsdos. I also found and downloaded the Jan 04 Zipslack kernel and tried that. Nothing I've tried has helped.



I Googled to see if anyone else had run into the same problem and fixed it. I found several descriptions of various versions of the problem but no solutions.



I've run out of things to try and places to look. Is there something wrong with init or with the Zipslack files as provided? Does anyone have any other ideas to try?

I'm kind of a ZipSlack whiz, but I haven't seen this problem before. the funny thin is that init is starting so it should run. Maybe you should try the ZipSlack 8.1 instead- it's lighter and more stable anyway. Read my HOWTO at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~gnashley/...ix8_1howto.htm
You may be able to get X working. Since you have Win3.1 just add XFree86-base, Xfree86-fonts-misc, and blackbox, then Opera 5,6, or 7.22

Last night as I was falling asleep I had another thought. Maybe I had a similar problem last week whe I was moving stuff around. I moved an already unzipped installation from FAT 32 to a FAT 16 and then back and had all kinds of problems. S try this...
Instead of untipping ZipSlack on the XP machine, copy the ZIP file over to the laptop and unzip it there in place. Hope you have enough space. If not run the ZipSlack from the ZIP drive as you did before, run pkgtool and remove everything that's not in my Minimal Install list. Then, from your XP box make a new ZIP file from the whole linux folder and pass that over to the laptop. You'll need to move the linux folder into a new folder so that the ZIP utility keeps the file structure with 'linux' at the top.
Winzip will let you create a 16bit self-extracting ZIP file.
If you don't have winzip, or even if you do, you might want to snag a copy of a great Windows Zipper out there, called alzip.

Thanks for your help.

I got it working.

Knowing that it was a problem with the DOS formats, I installed it a different way. There is a suggestion in the FAQ on how to unzip the file on a Windows 3.1/DOS system. I followed it, sort-of.

I booted using a disk I made from bootdisk.img and loaded the rescue disk. I doesn't tell you in the bootdisk message, but you have to enter "ramdisk root=/dev/fd0" when it gives you the "boot:" prompt. I did that to get the driver loaded for the parallel port zip dirve. (It tells you that in the message for bare.i, but that doesn't have the driver compiled in.)

I then did:

mkdir /mnt/zip
mount -t msdos /dev/sda4 /mnt/zip
mount -t umsdos /dev/hda1 /mnt/hd
cd /mnt/hd
unzip /mnt/zip/sipslack.zip

It installed and when I did the linux.bat line for loading for /mnt/hda1 it ran and did a proper init.

Thanks again.