I'm currently trying to install Slackware on my Compaq Presario Laptop. I have successfully completed installations of Mandrake and Fedora Core 2, so I know that all of my hardware should be compatable, but Slackware can't seem to find my hard disk.

When I try: cfdisk /dev/hda
I get an error that says: FATAL ERROR: Cannot read disk drive

I have also tried creating the partitions with a different distro's bootdisk and using those for the install, but Slackware will not mount the partitions.

Any advice? I would really like to be able to try out Slackware!

Try fdisk - SuSE fubared one of my partitions, exceeding the boundary. cfdisk choked but fdisk handled with no problem. (That'll teach me not to stray from fdisk. ) Can't really imagine what it'd be otherwise - you're root on install and Slack doesn't have any known general weirdness with disks, especially if something else reads it.

Well, on a whim, I tired a different kernel at boot, and it worked fine.

Now I'm having trouble getting into graphical mode. In setup, I choose GNOME as my default environment, but the system boots up into the bash shell. How can I change it to load into GNOME?

Slack defaults to console - try 'startx' or edit /etc/inittab to change the default runlevel to '4'. You may need to run 'xwmconfig' first to make sure you get gnome but you've probably already covered that much.

I didn't think about the kernel issue but should have - the generic 2.6.7 wouldn't recognize my reiser without having the module in the initrd because it wasn't built in - might have been something like that.

Thanks for the quick reply. I was trying to make my way though the Slackware Book when you posted, and you hopefully saved me a bunch of reading. Now to boot up in Linux and try it!

Well, don't let me stop you. It's a good book with some essential stuff. (Needs to be updated, but still good.)

Good luck!