Alien Bob wrote:
Ah...that's an elegant solution to the "boot-load-size" problem.
Very nice indeed. Big Hint: darkglobe87, please try what Alien Bob's
post suggests.

--Lawrence

Thanks for the replies guys.

I'm using the CD image, not the DVD (no DVD drive).
Checked MD5 etc.

Going to try Alien Bob's mini CD.

Thanks.

UPDATE:
Downloaded the DVD image, extracted the .iso, putting the DVD's Slackware folder on my windows partition, burnt mini-cd, about to reboot.... wish me luck!

UPDATE II:
Right, got it booting, got the directory on my NTFS windows disk, just going to figure out how to "pre mount a directory" now, and then hopefully I'll be well on my way to the slackware desktop. Maybe.

Can't find any docs on pre-mounting directories. Grrr!

I've mounted hda1 which is where the slackware directory is, but still no luck. Do I have to actually mount the specific directory?

Cheers.

You mean that you mount the partition and not see the directory and files in it? or just when you mount the partition do not see anything?

Do you have an error message? please post it here.

How are you trying to mount the partition? put the command here...

Well I mounted /dev/hda1 (my windows XP partition of hard drive 1) before running setup, as Alien Bob sort of suggested (using command "mount /dev/hda1 /mnt"), but then when I choose the "install from pre-mounted partition" option, I enter the directory (it's C:\slackware in windows) /dev/hda1/slackware, it says "sorry" and something like "directory not found".

I'm not totally sure how to pre-mount my windows partition, and install from there. The partition is NTFS, and the installer says you can use FAT or Linux, but Bob said you can use NTFS. Maybe you can't?

All I need to do is make it so C:\slackware can be used to install from, as I didn't download 3.5 gigs for nothing. Could someone please maybe point out where I'm going wrong?

First mount the partition like this:
Then, start setup and proceed like you did before. When setup asks for the pre-mounted directory, enter
Eric

Just wanted to add a data point to this weird problem.

My PC104 refused to boot from the cdrom. I attempted the solution described here, but it didn't work for me. (oddly, it would boot from cdrom with a regular hard drive attached, but not with the solid-state drive attached that I needed to use for this project).

Eventually I swapped out my CD rom drive for one from an old Dell that was lying around -- then it wouldn't boot from cd at all. With or without the SSD attached. So I tried the cd with -boot-load-size 4 and now it works!

So apparently, it's CDROM related (maybe Dell specific cdroms?), not strictly BIOS related.