PC boots from Slack 14.1 bootable mediai, but not 14.2 - DVD & USB
 

Hello.
Hard drive in my Slack box running 14.2 crashed. Replaced HD w/1TB WD and attempted to reload Slackware. Tried from a 14.2 bootable USB and PC did not recognize as bootable device. Tried from 13.1 Slack disk, same result. Used another Slack box running 14.2 to build a bootable USB (but the usbboot.img was a 14.1) and it booted into 14.1. Downloaded slackware64 iso file and used the dd if=slackware64-14.2-install-dvd.iso of=/dev/sdm
to copy it to a USB, again, not bootable. PC is an AMD Athlon (I think) box with an ASUS M4A785-M motheboard.

Is there a usbboot.img for 14.2? Any other ideas?

Thanks and cheers,
st

Athlon is an old pc. This box is well on in years - The m/b was released in the last millenium.

It boots on a usb key from 14.1. I'd personally suspect dodgy media in the usb and dodgy cdrom or media, or possibly both.

Motherboards that old still probably have ISA sockets, maybe a floppy drive, and serial & parallel ports which rely on fixed I/O & interrupts. IIRC, in 2004 a kernel revision accommodated floating I/O & interrupts, but kept old-tech compatibility for a few years. Use exclusively usb & PCI I/O with modern distros (like slack-13.1 -->).

You have a few options: Try everything (failing usb drives, cd media) in your newer box and see what works and what doesn't.

If you have an excellent floppy disk, and a working floppy drive, you can boot the antique on the 14.1 usb drive, and get yourself a floppy linux - still up on http://www.toms.net/rb That will at least provide an afternoon's entertainment. But it formats out to 1.82MB, which is very unforgiving on poor floppies.

Otherwise, if you can establish a network link with a newer box, Slackware's install dvd has an excellent directory "usb-and-pxe-installers" and you should go there and do what you're told.

Oops. My bad. The processor is a AMD HD9850XAJ4BGH Phenom X4 9850 Processor - Quad Core. About 10 years old. I'm going to try replacing the DVD-ROM drive and see if she'll recognize the 13.1 disk. I'm also going to try building a bootable Slackware 14.2 USB on a different USB drive, though I'm not optimistic. I can put this guy on the same subnet as my currently operating 14.2 unit so it all else fails I'll try that. I'll let you know.

Thanks and cheers,
st

Get on to http://bear.alienbase.nl

I used the slackware live version and have a working key; but I had to work backwards to find stuff. It's organized for a live distro. You can run the thing off that

Phenom is a better cpu, ok. I'll take it you didn't have the floppy drive :)?
Mind you, back in the day, when I was a linux newbie and short on storage and had a family abusing the pc, things died an awful lot quicker. A Tomsrtbt floppy saved my a** more often than I care to remember.

You will find the usbboot.img on every slackware mirror under "usb-and-pxe-installers", eg.:

for 14.2:
https://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/slackw...xe-installers/

for current:
https://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/slackw...xe-installers/

Have a look at the readme files. PXE is your other option.

You may also consider burning your own installation dvd. Guidance here:
https://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/slackw...14.2/isolinux/

Also double check BIOS to see if you have the right boot options enabled.

I used to have Slackware 14.2 installed on a similar machine in the past, so hardware shouldn't be a problem, unless it's broken of course ;-).

Success! The Phenom PC does not support network boot, but I was able to build a 14.2 installation disk and successfully install. Thanks for your help gentlemen (or lady and gentleman, or ladies, as the case may be...) :-)
Cheers,
st

And please permit me to expound a bit. I used a USB DVD RW to burn the install disk on a Windows box, then used the same USB DVD RW to boot the Phenom PC. That removed any potential hardware incompatibilities that might have been a root cause. I suspect I had a hardware problem. However, this does not explain why the usbboot.img file that I downloaded from the Slack website 14.2 directory booted into 14.1.

You can explain that by downloading afresh the usbboot.img from 14.1 & 14.2 and diff-ing them, or running a checksum test on them.