I have not been able to burn without errors.

I created one. HOWEVER Intel's BIOS contrary to their own documentation does NOT support USB Boot.

"I have not been able to burn without errors."

Maybe you have bad cd burner, or maybe not...
Which software were you using to try burning the cd/dvd and what were the errors?
Did you verify you downloaded image before burning?

If your drive can read medium, but not burn because sometimes only burning capabilities go out (I've lost them to hard freezes) then maybe you can use friend or colleague's machine to burn cd/dvd...

Otherwise, since your bios doesn't allow booting from USB, you could, from the debian install you are working from, use a tool like gnu parted to shrink a partition on your drive and create space for a new partition. You can use fdisk to create a new partition. And then you could use dd to clone the slackware installation .iso onto the new partion. You would also have to alter the lilo or grub (bootloader) configuration on the debian system to make the new partition available as an option during boot time. After that you could boot the slackware installer, and then have access to that setup command!

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I did finally get a operable burn just NOT of the full Disc 1
Details of the experience are below, perhaps it'll help someone else one day.

dc4bbf11c0779e2ef16c8aca99aeabd0 slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso

Yes, I verified "MD5 Check Sums are the same."

ISO Recorder Software- "Operation has failed. Code:80004005, Reason: Unspecified error"

InfraRecorder Software version 0.51.0.0 (x86) - "Process exited with code: 254."

Roxio Software - "Roxio failed to burn this disc (Extended error: 0x80041024)."

Power2Go Software- I failed record the error message from Power2go.

All of these variously burn media result in a "Disk error 20, AX=42FD, drive EF" error message during attempts to boot slackware 13.1.

Burns were attempted using both 650MB Zenith and 700MB Optimum CDR media. I followed the various documentation instructions to complete the burn attempts and I have successfully burned iso images using both this media and these DVD-RW's in the recent past. Infra-Recorder is usually my software of choice. However, no such luck this time.

HOWEVER - onebuck pointed me to Slackware 13.1 mini-iso designed, compiled and provided by none other than our very own Alien Bob

The iso-mini is specifically designed for those "planning to install Slackware using packages on a local hard disk partition, or from a NFS/HTTP/FTP server...The mini-ISO image of less than 40MB in size contains everything to let you
do the above, and nothing more" -basically, for whatever reason the smaller iso image burned quick and clean on first attempt and let me boot into Slackware Set-up. YAH!

I deleted my partitions with cfdisk. Ran the:
loop courtesy of samk

Everything seemed good, but I am still have issues. As in, I still can't boot without the mini-iso CD installed. Not sure why yet. Still working on it. I don't think the loop installed lilo in a bootable sector. I made my first partition swap instead of root.. and not sure yet even where lilo even is. But making progress now at least I can boot into a slackware setup.

Never a dull moment,
SlowLearner

You do not have to do that manually. I'll let you in on a secret: if you do not loop-mount that ISO first, and instead for "pre-mounted directory" you enter the directory name where you keep the (DVD-) ISO image, then the installer will loop-mount the ISO for you at the proper location. It will then proceed with the next step (selecting the packages you want to install).

To me that sounds like you never installed lilo at all. If you are able to successfully boot into your Slackware system using the mini ISO , then perhaps all that's needed next is to run the command "lilo" once. Then try to reboot without the CDROM.
Also, post your /etc/lilo.conf file here.

Eric

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Alien Bob - THANK YOU for all your contributions to PXE boot wiki, the USB install tools and help you offer, the mini-iso I used to get this far and all your contributions to this forum. Your work is GREATLY appreciated.

You were RIGHT ! I couldn't whereis or find lilo anything anywhere on my PC

I still don't have one...

REALLY This sounded great to me. I deleted my old partitions, reformated got into setup and was working through TARGET Set up your target partitions when I came to:

"PICK MOUNT POINT FOR /dev/sdb1 # this is the USB where my slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso is
Now this partition must be mounted somewhere in your directory tree. Please enter the directory under which you would like to put it.For instance, you might want to enter /fat-c or something similiar. NOTE: This partition won't actually be mounted until you reboot. Where would like to mount /dev/sdv1?

I thought this might be an issue... but I gave it the name /DOS and set-up brought me to SOURCE Select source media - I chose Install from a pre-mounted directory

You will need to type in the name of the directory containing the subdirectories for each source disk.. Which directory would you like to install from?

Nothing I try to enter here seems to work for me:
/DOS
/DOS/slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso
/dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1/DOS
/dev/sdb1/DOS/slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso
/etc/ftab
/etc/fstab/dev/sdb1/DOS
/etc/fstab/dev/sdb1/DOS/slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso

Each of these result in the following error message:

What am I missing??

You are not understanding what the "TARGET" means. The TARGET section of the setup lets you assemble your future filesystem by attaching the various disk partitions to mount points.
You do not want the partition of your USB stick to be permanently listed in your computer's /etc/fstab ... because Slackware will try to mount the partition every time you boot the computer.

What you need to do instead, is mount the disk partition where you keep your Slackware ISO before you start the "setup". That's why it is called a "pre-mounted directory". The smartest thing to do, is to create a new directory for mounting that partition (for instance: "mkdir /mypart ; mount /dev/sdX1 /mypart" if your ISO file is on the disk partition /dev/sdX1).

Continuing with my example. The SOURCE is where setup will get the Slackware packages. Suppose you have mounted the partition with the Slackware ISO on a directory "/mypart" which you created just for this purpose, and the directory on that partition where you keep the ISO image is called "/somedirectory" then you would type the following pathname: "/mypart/somedirectory". Looking at your post, you have the ISO in the root of the partition so then you would type "/mypart".

Eric

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wow, ok yeah clearly I had no idea. THANK YOU for clarifying that for this newbie.

From the root prompt I made /mypart and mounted my USB drive to it with mount /dev/sdb1 /mypart

ls /mypart -l #now yields
root root 619mb mar 12 slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso*
root root 704mb mar 12 slackware-13.1-install-d2.iso*
root root 679mb mar 12 slackware-13.1-install-d3.iso*

Went into setup formatted root /boot /home /usr /var

Told setup to install from /mypart

Package Series Selection only offers:[*] A Base Linus system <OK>

I selected full <OK>
less than a 3 seconds later "System configuration and installation is complete"

I know there is no way the iso installed that fast.. do i need to EXTRACT the iso first or something?? I am at a loss again.

Just for grins I selected "newbie" verbose prompting mode next time.
I never got any prompts it SAID I had selected newbie verbose prompting then fairly immediately I get the SETUP COMPLETE dialog box.

I tried to look at my root partition /dev/sda3 and get a
"according to mtab, dev/sda3 is already mounted on /mnt
soooo setup was trying to do it's thing.
du /mnt -ch yields 17K about 15 files boot files,usr,home,var/logs (I haven't figure out how to 'read' the contents of.- THAT might be helpful)


Does anyone know what step I am missing to complete a "Install from pre-mounted directory"?

And thanks for reading my futile rambles this far.

I implied it already when I wrote, "you enter the directory name where you keep the (DVD-) ISO image" but you can only use the DVD ISO image for automatic loop-mounting... the setup looks specifically for "slackwar*-install-dvd.iso" in the directory you specify.

If you have only the 3 CDROM ISO images but no DVD ISO then you'll have to fall back to manual loop-mounting all three of them.

Eric

1 members found this post helpful.

oh wow, ok, no problem.
I did NOT catch that or even think of it, but yes ok good for newbies to know - DVD ISO will work different than a CD ISO.

DVD ISO setup will mount and loop from the installer when chosing Install from a pre-mounted directory

CD ISO needs to be manually mounted and looped into a newly created directory prior to entering SETUP and selecting Target.

The method to this madness can be found earliar on this thread in post #4 by samk

My own install is actually happening on to desktop hard drive as I type this on the laptop, right now. YAH!

Now that this little portion of just a simple install of operating system is drawing to a close for me I am just now beginning to understand what is happening behind the curtain during the install. A big advantage to linux of windows is that there IS no curtain.

Much sincere thanks to you Alien Bob for all your patience with this newbie.

Thank you for your post and nice Slackware USB-installer! I use this trick yesterday and successful install it on my PC for first time =)

So, if I am currently using ubuntu and have a seperate /home directory will it work if I copy the contents of the first three cd ISOs to /home/user/slackinst/ and then directly after I boot from USB stick before I run setup mount the directory with something like mount /dev/sda5/home/user/slackint /slackinst