My laptop has only an external USB device for a CDROM and, although I can boot the installer, Slack can't find the programs to install. (Dell D400, Slack 10.)

I have a vfat partition and have tried mounting ISOs via the loopback, copying the CD files directly to that partition and mounting the partition so that the installer can use them. I can see the files fine, and the installer will go through the motions - setting up swap, selecting packages and so on. When it comes time to install, it pauses for 5 seconds and reports back that all is done - I should reboot. Except all is not well. Nothing was written to the target partition, no lilo, nothing. I've repeated the process many times with various options, but the symptoms never change.

Other things I've tried:
* NFS install, but the Slack installer can't seem to deal with the onboard NIC
* modprobing usb-storage and all manner of things to get the installer to read the packages from the CDROM
Which is why I think I'm stuck with a hard drive install. If it would work.

Partitions:
hda1 - NTFS
hda2 - FAT32
hda3 - Reiser
hda4 - swap

The 10.0 CDs were copied to hda2 with XP. I was able to get the ISOs to hda2 with Knoppix.

What the heck am I missing.

Thanks.

edit:
I was not telling the installer to go the the "slackware" dir, only to /dev/hda2. I was able to install from the CD copies on the fat32 partition. Not ideal, but it worked.