Ran into an interesting issue going through the Sarpi install guide to install the latest slackwarearm-current to my new RPi4.

I mounted a device (Win95 32 LBA) to /floppy containing slackwarearm-current (all the packages), according to the installer guide recommending /floppy as a good mount point for the source packages.

When I tried installing with source set to Pre-Mounted Directory, the installer does not install even 1 package, and immediately goes to the step asking to create a root password - normally this is the step that happens after all the packages are installed.

I tried this with two different devices - a Samsung T5 SSD and a SanDisk Flash Drive. Same result both times.

It appears that the installer somehow interferes with or can't use a device mounted in /floppy, and installation does not proceed properly.

What worked fine is not mounting anything in /floppy, using the SanDisk Flash Drive, and selecting to use a USB Drive in the installer which it then autodetects as /dev/sda1. Installation proceeds normally after that, all the packages get installed as expected.

I can't remember if I ran into the same issue months ago when I did the installation to my older RPi3. I might have.

When I did the /floppy pre-mount approach, I set SOURCE to /floppy/slackwarearm-current. Maybe I needed to set to /floppy/slackwarearm-current/slackware directory instead, not sure - might try this sometime.

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OK cool. Thanks for this. It's highlighted a missing link and/or clearer instructions on the SARPi website's https://sarpi.fatdog.eu/index.php?p=srcmedia page. I will aim to correct this oversight very soon.

You need to tell the installer during 'setup' where to find the "slackware" directory that contains the PACKAGES.TXT file and all the lovely *.txz packages [a,ap,d,k,l,x,y, etc.]. So, where-ever that resides is what the installation pre-mounted directory path should be. If the Slackware ARM source media is located in the "slackware-current" directory on your USB stick which is mounted in '/floppy' then '/floppy/slackwarearm-current/slackware' would be the pre-mounted directory. Not '/floppy/slackwarearm-current'. The installer will look for PACKAGES.TXT file and if it doesn't find it the process will error. So, the directory which contains the PACKAGES.TXT file is the one you need to specify specify as your "install from pre-mounted directory" path. This will always be "slackware" directory under the official Slackware ARM source tree.

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