David R. Bernhardt wrote:
>
> 486DX w/2 HD's (Maxtor 7546, 500+mb ea.), a Panasonic
> 2X CD-ROM drive, a 3.5" FD plus tape BU, 32mb RAM.
> I have been trying to load Slackware 96.
> Note on the CD-ROM SoundBlaster card: the card is
> set up for I/O ports of 0x310 and 0x350 only.
>
> if I just let the boot disk run thru its routine, it
> does not recognize the CD-ROM,
This is your problem. Believe it or not, Linux does
not support your CDrom drive. I was in exactly the
same position when I first tried Linux. I had a
Creative CD200 CDrom drive that connected through
my SoundBlaster card. After many days of frustration,
I finally found some documentation which said that
the CD200 drive is not supported in Linux.
Fortunately, you have a straightforward solution. If you
don't already have a DOS partition on drive C: create one
on drive D: (40-50meg should do). Using DOS, copy the
entire A series from the CDrom drive to the DOS partition.
You'll find the A series on the CDrom under the /slakware
directory.
Now boot and run COLOR.GZ. Under SELECT THE SOURCE MEDIA,
choose INSTALL FROM HD PARTITION. This should enable you
to install the basic Slackware system and get it up and
running. Later, you can use the same procedure to install
any other packages you want: use DOS to copy them from
the CDrom to the DOS partition and then use pkgtool in
Linux to install them.
> Although I am reasonably competent with DOS/WIN/C plus
> working on the hardware, my practical experience with
> UNIX/Linux is very limited.
Don't be discouraged. You've hit a particularly nasty
problem right at the beginning. It's going to be much
easier from now on.
If you have any other problems, please don't hesitate
to contact me. I'm running Slackware 3.5 on a couple
of 486s, so I should be able to help.
Cheers,
Steven
