Im trying to install slackware on my sony pcg-z505ls but i have no floppy to load the pcmcia driver off of. Can i book off the cdrom and run the setup off a fat32 partition? What can I do?

The Slack install CD should be bootable and allow the install without PCMCIA. Unless of course your CDROM is PCMCIA based. There is a way to boot Linux from a DOS partition using "loadlin". I think the files may be under the boot disks directory. If not, then let me know and I will search it out if you are unable to locate. The loadlin program is what zipslack is based on.

Its pcmcia and am running xp so i think dos is out of the question.

How did the XP get installed? If original, then wouldn't they have allocated the entire disk? I thought most of the Sony notebooks used USB CDROM drives that were bootable. This would be required I would think for their restore CD, etc.

I got a pcmcia cdrom I just used the windows xp cd and it worked, When i boot the slack 8.1 cd i can run setup i just can't get to the packages and all that good stuff.

I put the slack cd on /dev/hda5/slackware my fat32 partition After it says installing packages it says Finished installing and configureing your system please reboot, but i didn't install lilo or pick what packages i want to install.

I think I understand where you were having the difficulty. After booting and running setup, the Slack install would not detect the cdrom and mount the CD. That is because it is a pcmcia CDROM. OK. So you created a partition and copied the Slack install CD to a partition and selected to install Slack from that source on your hard disk. Was that partition mounted prior to running setup? Have you created your root destination partition for Slack (like /dev/hda2 or something)?

It is possible to mount just an iso image using loopback under a mount point. Let's say you downloaded the iso image using XP. So then you would need to boot the system using the Slack CD. Create a directory like, "mkdir /xp". Then mount your XP partition and then the Slack iso image using loopback.

mknod /dev/loop0 b 7 0
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /xp
mount -t iso9660 -o loop /xp/path_to_iso/slackware.iso /cdrom

Modify the above as required for your paths, etc. The /cdrom directory is where setup would normally mount the CD. Use cfdisk to create a partition to install Slack on, if you haven't as yet. Run "setup" to start the install process. When you select your source, select to use premounted directory and specify /cdrom/slackware. If you continue through with the setup prompts and take the default for all packages, etc. It will require about 2 GByte, so allocate at least 3 GByte if you can. The time required will be 30 to 45 minutes I would think. Different screens will be displayed indicating the progress. Then that process will be followed by the configuration process and installing lilo.

During the lilo stage, if you let it figure it out automatically it should allow for your XP partition. If given a choice though for the install location and MBR is chosen, then it will remove the XP master boot record and install lilo there. If you have more than one partition maked as bootable, then you have to install lilo to MBR because Microsoft doesn't like two bootable partitions. If you install lilo to the superblock of your slack partition then mark it as bootable only. Remove the bootable flag from the XP. So that the DOS boot loader will start the slack partition and load lilo for the boot manager.

Perhaps some of this will be of some assistance to you.

I downloaded the iso and i tired it but it stills says after it says installing packages "System configuration and installation complete Please reboot your pc" it didn't give me the menu to install lilo or the network or anything after i choose which why i want to pick my packages and goes back to the main menu.

If the packages installed, you can choose the from the main menu to run the config process. If the package selection and installation did not process, then it is probably still not seeing the slackware package directory or perhaps you haven't chosen a destination directory. The main menu is presented in the order of the installation process.

When I try to run the config from the main menu it just stays at the main menu. I'll keep playing with it, if i can't get it im try a diff distro

I got it, I used the dmesg command to find out what file the cdrom is , and i installed it from a cdrom and it worked.