I can't even get to the installation

[TaeShadow]

Ok, I'm trying to install Slackware 7.1 on an old 486. The system has an IDE hard drive and CDROM. The CDROM is not bootable so I made a bootdisk and a root disk. I put the bootdisk in the drive and started up the computer. The kernel uncompressed and began loading. I was then presented with the following messages:

hdb: drive not ready for command.
ide0: reset timed-out, status 0xff

If I unplug the CDROM, I get the same message with hda instead of hdb. Any clues?
By the way, I was able to get Red Hat 5.2 to work a long time ago. I don't have the disk any more, though.

Tae

[arowland]

Is your HDD hda and CD hdb in your normal config? In other words, only two physical drives, the HD and CD? Sounds like your boot disk can't find the CD load image. Check the drive (should be the CD) the boot disk is pointing to. This all assumes the boot disk also loads the appropriate CD driver...

[TaeShadow]

I have not even installed Linux yet. The boot disk is not pointing to the CD drive. There is nothing at all on the hard drive. Of course, I could just be misunderstanding you.

[Iceman]

Tae:

What sort of MOBO and HDD?

Also, are the HDD and CD-R on separate IDE controllers, or is it a master/slave setup?

I vaguely recall having a problem like this long ago. Think I ended up putting the HDD and CD-R on separate controllers.

[TaeShadow]

I'm not quite familiar with the way it is set up inside. There appears to be only 1 IDE controller. It is on a card. Also on the card is the floppy drive controller, a serial port, and a parallel port. It seems that it is set up so that the CD drive is a master and the hard drive is a slave. I do not know what kind of motherboard it is. It's about 7 years old, though.

[TaeShadow]

Just returning this post to the top...