I'm not a complete newbie to Linux, but I am seriously rusty on command line stuff...

Anyway, I'm trying to install Slackware 12.1 (blank slate) on an IBM NetVista 8310-27U with a Memorex 16x DDL-IN DVD+RW drive, and although the installer boots from it just fine (using DVD install), the installer itself can't find the drive to use as a source image.

I also tried the FTP install options, but the onboard NIC doesn't work, and it's not recognizing the wired PCI NIC, only the wireless one, which isn't helpful at this point.

(Posting this from a Sony VAIO PCV-RX260DS that runs Zenwalk like a dream...)

By default the setup will just scan various device points until it finds the correct one for your source optical drive. It might work better if you actually specify the device instead. During the process you should be able to find error messages.

If it chugs and chugs and can't seem to read it, it could be a problem with DMA. On some machines I had to boot from the cd, use hdparm to turn off dma, and then run setup. When I was done I would turn dma back on and reboot into the new system.

The device seems to be /dev/hdc. If I specify this directly, it claims to be unable to find it. If I allow it to go through the auto-detection, it goes through everything and doesn't find it (the drive doesn't even spin up at any point), even after disabling dma.

I have a couple of LiveCDs sitting around here (Knoppix and Ubuntu, anyway), I'm wondering if copying the image to a partition would possibly work better, or at least well enough that I could get Slackware installed and then fiddle around with getting the DVD drive to work. But I'm not sure how to go about that. Believe it or not, this is the first time I've ever had trouble with any Linux installation.

UPDATE: Knoppix wouldn't work at all, and once I booted into Ubuntu it wouldn't let me remove the CD to change over (heh, I don't know why I thought it would ^^). So I installed Zenwalk, and, even though it finds the drive just fine, it refuses to mount anything in that drive once installed. So now I'm sure it's some kind of problem with the drive, but it might be caused by the fact that Slackware is on a DVD and Zenwalk is on a CD? Well, since Zenwalk works I think I'll just download the Slackware files and try again to install from a mounted partition.