Task difficulty: medium

Alright, things are better for the little laptop.

When I tried to view the hard drive through a USB device (basically, an IDE port stuck onto a USB cable), both XP and Windows 2000 saw the drive as a 1.4 TB drive that was uninitialized. And it couldn’t initialize it. Fiddling with various drivers made no difference. A scanning program like R-Studio could see perfectly well the partitions and old files on the drive (including from the Windows installation that had been there), but it still thought it was a 1.4 TB drive.

So that was a no-go.

The drive is too tall to fit into the bay of my main laptop, or I’d’ve loaded that puppy in and installed Slackware from a CD.

I did, however, manage to borrow a AMS Tech floppy drive from the old roommate, Ryan. I should mention (since it seems I haven’t, yet) that this laptop is an AMS Tech Soundwave, the very first model of laptop we had here at Rose.

With the floppy drive and two old disks, I made the 4 disks needed to get the Slackware install ready to run from my PCMCIA network card. (Yes, I rotated disks, raw-writing one on my desktop as I was reading the other on the laptop.)

But… Slackware doesn’t allow installation over FTP. WTF. Seriously.

So I gave up for the night with the laptop sitting at the “What method will you use to install Slackware?” screen. It’s not like I have a lot of choice. I had to hunt down an NFS server (Allegro) for WinXP, and I’ve dumped the contents of the three CDs into an exported share.

We’ll see when I get home if I can actually connect to it and install Slackware from it. *crosses fingers*