Hello, I'm Dan.

I just recently got the installation disks for slackware 9.1. I'm using an HP laptop (circa '97) with the switch-out floppy and cd drives. This unit does not have the ability to boot from cd. The drives are NOT hot-swappable; I have to reboot the system every time I want to switch between drives. I've gotten past the bare.i, install.1 and install.2 disks, and I've created a ~2 gig main partition and 140 meg swap partition. You can guess my problem: when I try to specify the installation source, naturally it can't find it because the system needs to be rebooted in order to recognise the CD drive.

I've tried restarting and it gives me a dead end. I've even set the main partition to bootable and whenever I reboot, the system just hangs for eternity, like it's trying to boot but can't.

Does anyone know how I can work around this? Possibly copy the ramdisk to the bootable partition so it loads it at boot-time? Any help would be appreciated.

Check into installing "ZipSlack"

http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/

Perhaps you can install it, boot into Slack with the cd drive installed
and do the setup from there.

How exactly would that help me? Could I get into the CD's installation program by running zipslack?

Maybe you can do a network installation.

It can probably be done if you can get ZipSlack on the machine with a linux partition
then use pkgtool to install packages, build youself a kernel, configure lilo, etc...

How horrible!, I'm sorry I mentioned it.

If you have another machine or a fast internet connection, there is a beta for
installing via ftp available here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slackftp/