I have an old comp that's running SCO OpenServer and I'm trying to install slack 9.1 on it (and remove SCO). It's got one hard drive, one cd-rom, and one floppy drive. The problem is that I can't seem to boot from anything but the hard drive.

First I popped in the first slack9.1 disk, restarted, but it didn't load. So then I checked the BIOS for the boot order, it has two options: A,C or C,A. Nothing about the cd-rom.

Next I tried creating a bootdisk. I copied bare.i in the bootdisk folder to a floppy with rawritexp, then made sure the boot order was A,C, then started with that disk in the floppy drive, but it still booted normally. I can hear the floppy being accessed just before SCO's boot: prompt comes up.

What floppy disks/images do I need to get the slackware installation going? I have both slack 9.1 ISO's burned to disks and would like to be able to install from those.

Any ideas?

elyk

I think instead of bare.i you may want to chose the boot image with support for your cdrom. What OS did you make the bootdisk in? If you we're using the sco you probably want to use the dd method:
http://www.slackware.com/install/bootdisk.php

elyk; try this,http://www.ibiblio.org/mdw/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO table of contents and expand. it is extensive about 50-75 pages of info. scroll scroll
u r boat.

In your BIOS, under Basic Configuration ((settings) the first or 2nd option), make sure your CD-ROM is specified....i.e not set to Auto....im not sure but maybe cos its set to auto the oprion to boot from it isnt coming up....failing this, might be worth looking for a newer BIOS version for your motherboard from the maufactorers website and flashing it, its prolly got the boot from cd-rom option now

Failing them two, you could use this command taken from www.slackware.org :-

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Creating The Boot Disk





Once you have selected a boot disk image file from the list below, you will need to create the disk. If you are creating the image from a Linux system, the following command should work just fine:


dd if=[image file name] of=/dev/fd0


You may need to change /dev/fd0 depending on your configuration. If you are creating the image from a DOS system, the included program RAWRITE will help you make the disk. Here is the syntax for RAWRITE:


C:\>RAWRITE [image file name] [destination drive letter]:

For example, if I wanted to make a boot disk from the net.i image on a DOS system with the floppy drive as A:, I would use the following command.


C:\>RAWRITE net.i a:


You should now have a working boot disk to use during the Slackware Linux installation.

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Good luck

I made the bootdisk in winXP, so that shouldn't be a problem, i don't think.

The BIOS has options for all drives: Auto and Modes 0 through 4. They were all on auto. Which one do I need?

I tried all those modes and the A,C or C,A were the only options that appeared. Do you mean 'auto' in the settings for hard drives where it lists the number of cyls, tracks, etc.?

The cdrom is a Mitsumi 32x configured as primary slave.

I'll give the dd command a try when I boot slackware on a different machine, see if that makes any difference.

The very first column next to the IDE Channel is where I'm on about...

Primary Master - HDD
Primary Slave - Not Used
Secondary Master - CDROM
Secondary Slave - Not Used

instead of where I've put CDROM, if it says Auto, that might be why your not getting the option, but if it says CDROM and your not getting the option, you will find that the Motherboard Manufacturer will have released a new BIOS Revision that includes the CDROM boot option

Go to http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/ and download Smart Boot Manager.
Install it to a floppy.
If the A drive works on your machine - put the SBM floppy in and it should boot up
and give you an option to select the CD.
Select CD and (with the Slack in) it should work

a3Rogue: I don't seem to have the CDROM option you speak of. The BIOS will let me configure a section on hard drives on pri/sec master/slave (such as none, auto, user, and some preconfigured options). I tried setting the CDROM (on primary slave) to auto instead of none, it tries to autodetect it, then says something like "Detecting Primary Slave ... None". I assume that it is only searching for hard drives.

After the initial startup screen it displays some device and memory configuration that looks something like this:

----------
Drive A: 3.5" 1.44MB FLOPPY
Drive B: None
Pri. Master Disk: LBA ,Mode 4, 1624MB
Pri. Slave Disk: None
Sec. Master Disk: None
Sec. Slave Disk: None
----------

Since it says "disk", I don't know if that should include a cdrom or only hdd's.


earlbrik: I tried that program, installed to a floppy, but again it skipped booting from the floppy and went straight to SCO's boot prompt.

I don't know enough about SCO and UFS partitions to know what its boot prompt offers. If I try to give any command such as "root=/dev/fd0" it mocks me and says something like "hd(40)root= not found". So I looked around and found some folder SCO mounts (again I don't know about UFS so I don't know what partition it's mounting) that contains the programs the boot prompt runs. It had files such as unix, unix.old, dos, and some others, but nothing resembling a linux boot prompt and nothing about floppy drives.

On my slackware box I ran the command "dd if=bare.i of=/dev/fd0" to create a boot disk from the bootdisks folder on the first installation CD, tried it out, and it still skipped loading the floppy and booted SCO.

I checked www.esupport.com for a BIOS upgrade so right now I'm waiting for their reply. The startup screen says something like this (if these numbers are useful to anyone):

----------
Award Modular BIOS v4.50PG
586 PCI GREEN BIOS ( 61XS_Ver.F )
Award Plug and Play BIOS Extension v1.0A

12/22/95-82430FX-2A59CF2NC-00
----------

I could always do something drastic such as add the hard drive to another working computer and attempt an install, but I don't know how to configure a slackware installation so that it would get everything correct for the other machine.

Keep the suggestions coming!