Dear List,
Last week, I sent a plea to the list asking for help with installing Slackware and Debian. As a result of that, John Seago kindly delivered his CD sets to me and now I've got Slackware 8 installed and working. It turns out that I had two problems: (1) the Crazy Penguin CDs were no good, and (2) my 12X CD drive kept locking up when installing .TGZ files to HD - if I copied the files to the DOS partition first and installed from there, it worked. My CD drive problem appeared to be solved by getting hold of an old IDE 2X Wearnes drive - that installed Slackware from the CDs, slowly, but without any further problems.
Encouraged, I tried installing Debian 2.2r3 from John's CDs. Firstly, it claimed that it couldn't find /cdrom/ (having already installed the 'base system' from CD...) but I seemed to overcome that by installing a different 'flavor' of system - I'd tried idepci at first, but ended up with the 'vanilla' one (is that the right term??). Having installed the abse system, I then got as far as choosing the packages to install. Unfortunately, part way through the package installation, I got these messages:
hdc: irq timeout: status=0xd0 {Busy} hdc: ATAPI reset complete hdc: status error: status=0x58 {DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest} hdc: drive not ready for command (etc.)
A new line, similar to those above, would appear every few seconds. The CD LED was permanently on and I couldn't open the drawer. Very similar to the problems I was having with the 12X drive last week.
So I'm stumped (again) and my question (eventually!) is: where do I go from here? Why does the CD drive get locked up like this? (And why didn't it happen whilst installing Slackware 8?)
Sorry if I seem very stupid asking these questions, but I'm desperate for an answer. (Details: P166-MMX with 64Mb RAM, Cirrus 5446 video onboard, 3Gb HD on hda and IDE CD drive on hdc) Any clues will be very gratefully received!
All the best,
Gerald.