Slack 11: Won't boot from CD
 

This is driving me up the wall!!!!!


Slack 11 will not boot from the CD on my old compaq presario. The CD works fine in another machine and my Slack 10.2 CD will boot on this machine. I've burnt 4 different CD's now (using slow burn speeds, Nero and Roxio) and none work. I can see all the files on the disk so it looks like the burn process has worked fine.

In the end, i made a sata.i boot disk, ran that. It booted fine but then had a kernel panic (cant post error message as I'm at work at the moment).

Any ideas why the CD problem would be happening?

Can I boot from the 10.2 disk and then run setup from the v11 disk??

Hi,

You could try the sbootmgr just to be sure the cd is booted. The sbootmgr by-passes the BIOS. The BIOS could be a possible problem.

What bugs me is that you say that the system boots a 10.2 cd. Did you create the cd on the same burner? Did you change media type or manufacture?

When you used the sata.i bootdisk, did you pass the noinitrd parameter?

edit: grammar

I'm trying that tonight. Will I be prompted for supplemental disks or do I have to pass a parameter of somesort?

I tried two different CD burners (one of which is the one used to burn the 10.2) and used 3 different manufacturers CD's!

Very confusing.

No, should I have done?

Just realised I didnt use the install.1 and .2 disks, so thats were I went wrong there! I've also decided to try bare.i as its an old system and completely ide.

Cheers for your help.

Hi,

No! The sbootmgr is just that a boot manager that will allow you to select the available boot devices. If parameters are need for the selected boot device then pass them after the selection.

This problem could be something as simple as compliance. Meaning the track layed down is offset.

You won't need the bootdisks if you can boot the slackware cd1.

The CD wont boot, end of story!

I was being a muppet though. Its so long since I've installed from floppy, that I forgot the install disks! D'oh!!!

I'm very ashamed.:rolleyes:

All working now. :)

can't boot from CD but have no floppy drive
 

Saw this thread, I'm having the same problem booting Slack 11 on an older Dell box. It does NOT have a floppy drive, and it can NOT boot from a floppy connected via USB, so floppy booting is completely not an option. The drive will boot a GRML 0.8 CD just fine, but it won't boot Slackware either in CD or DVD format. I've tried burning at different speeds, different burners, etc. with no go. I'm thinking of trying to burn sbootmgr to a boot CD then swap out the CD and pop in the slack CD to see if it'll take then...

any other ideas?

Flint M

fmillion will your slack CDs or DVD boot on any computer? If it boots on another computer then your CDs are not the issue. Have you double checked your BIOS to make sure it is set to boot off of the CD drive before the hard drive?

I considered it being the BIOS, and that seems to be the case. Seems Dell systems are a lot more picky about what they'll boot. This system booted a GRML CD just fine but wouldn't boot Slackware on either CD or DVD. I have another Dell box circa 2000 that also will not boot the Slack CD or DVD. The workaround I finally got to work was to get the kernel, init ramdisk, and loadlin, then drop them on a CD coupled with a bootable 1.44 disk that contains DOS and CDROM drivers. The system was willing to boot that CD to DOS, and I could then use Loadlin to get the Linux kernel running, then I just swapped out my CD for the Slack DVD and I was off and running.

Thumbs DOWN to picky BIOSes! Thumbs DOWN to no future updates on these BIOSes!

Well atleast you got it booting some flavor of Linux. Good job!