Slackware 8.1 ISO and fun stuff

[SpicyJ]

Ok, I've got the much-dreaded ISO won't boot problem for Slack 8.1 It's got nothing to do w/ the boot order in my bios, the problem is actually described perfectly http://userlocal.com/dosslack/ (here).

I downloaded the rootdisk directory from slack, and am trying to use rawrite to make the install disks 1-5 (install.1, etc). I'm having no luck. My main machine is a WinXP box, and I haven't gotten it working on this one. The box I want to install Slack on, I've got Dos 6.22 on, and am trying the formatting/rawriting there, and it's also not working. After the rawrite is finished, if I do a dir a: I get a general media failure error. I cannot boot my machine off of that disk.

At this point, I am fresh out of ideas. Am I missing something? Any help would be great. :)

SJ

[SpicyJ]

Hey, I got it figured out.

I had to make a DOS boot disk that had loadlin.exe and my cdrom drivers on it. Boot to DOS, fdisked my hard drive, stuck the Slack8.1 ISO CD in my drive, and ran:

loadlin x:\kernels\bare.i\bzImage rw root=/dev/ram initrd=x:\isolinux\initrd.img load_ramdisk=1

(That's all on one line there).

I have no idea what that command is supposed to do, but it worked! :) I found it doing a google search, and gave it a shot.

[mdwatts]

The "media failure error" message was due to the diskette being written with the ext2 filesystem and not msdos.

Dos/Win cannot read ext2 or any of the other Linux filesystems.

You should however be able to boot from it though.

[SpicyJ]

Ahh, that makes sense...

I still couldn't boot with them though. But my abovementioned method worked fine...now if I can figure out how to get my network card setup...

[mdwatts]

Ensure you have PnP OS disabled in the bios as that alone can cause PCI devices to not be detected properly.

[SpicyJ]

It is...I've got a driver disk from the manufacturer (linksys) that had a package to use, I followed the instructions but when I ran make, I got lots of errors. :)

[mdwatts]

Most distros already include drivers/modules for the Linksys ethernet cards.

What model do you have? Search Google for Linux ( www.google.com/linux ) for the Linksys model and you should be able to find out what module it uses.

Then try as root

modprobe <module>

If that doesn't help, then could you please tell us a little bit about the errors. It's kinda hard to help without knowing what the problem is.

Whenever you compile hardware drivers, you need to ensure you have the kernel source installed for the kernel version you are currently running.

uname -r