If anyone has any experience with zipslack, (http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/)I could certainly use some help. I'm running Win98se, and I didn't feel like formatting, but wanted to install slackware anyway, so I opted for the zipslack. (Couldn't find bigslack, but whatever.) Anyway, after I extract to the root directory of my c drive, (my only hdd) I attempted to boot both off of a boot floppy and the linux dir. Either way, it gives me the kernel panic error, and refuses to mount. I KNOW that it's hda1, because I have ONE hdd, with ONE (so far as I remember) partition on it. Nevertheless, I've tried mounting on hda1-5, hdb1, and sda4 (default), all to no avail. I'm loathe to run fdisk to check my partition status, but I THINK I only set up a boot partition last time. I'm wondering if the (hypothetical) lack of an extended partition could be the problem? Anyway, just hoping someone has had some similar experience, cause I'd really like to get slackware up and running.

Do you know that you can define up to four partitions in your hard
drive? If you have only one partition at this time, I'd recommend
making at least another partition where you can install Zipslack.

Now before you get deeper into partitioning, make a backup (maybe
a full backup) so you can always recover your old data in Windows.
You do not need to have an extended partition to install/run linux.
It can be done, but in your case, you are better off using another
primary partition since you seem to have the space available, right?

Hope this helped

Why not run fdisk? I'd go ahead and do that. And maybe posting the uncommented line of linux.bat. And most of all, make sure you have the suitable kernel image - check the kernel directory of the server for alternative kernels if you feel that might be it. And did you use a 32-bit unzipper? I think it mangles the filenames otherwise. That's about all I can think of offhand.