Thanks for the replys and offers for new CD's. Thanks to Gary Dick (Also in Taupo) for the 7.2 CD's and the Slackware 8.0 CD. It appears that the Quantum Bigfoots really suck on DMA so I just turned it off. At the install prompt after booting from the CD I typed, text ide=nodma The machine I am using isnt ever going to run X (and moans about not having enough ram to use the graphical installer). In kernel parameters I added the same command. It works fine. I found the bios option to turn it off and on the strength of the respones in favour of this approach changing the mode of hda's IDE channel would have worked also.
Thanks for all your help. DSL modem arrives Friday or Saturday so funtimes are on the way. Mark Carey
