Instructions for installing Slackware on machines with a 5.25" boot drive
and a 3.5" second floppy drive.
---------------

5.25" boot drives are much better supported in version 1.0.4 than they 
have been before, but your second floppy drive must be a 3.5" high density
drive for you to be able to install the Slackware Linux release on machines
with a 5.25" boot drive.

The reason a 3.5" disk is needed is because there is not enough room to
put all the software needed for the boot disk on a 1.2 meg floppy. If things
continue to grow, I'd even venture to say that someday a 1.44 meg floppy
isn't going to cut it either, and unless you have a 2.88 meg drive you won't
be able to install. Hopefully those days are far off, though! :^)

To install on systems with a 5.25" boot drive, you must make a 5.25" disk which
is used to boot the 3.5" Slackware install disk. To do this, you need to get
the file "bloader" or "bloader.gz". Because the disk is mostly empty, a high
degree of compression was achived on the "bloader.gz" version. Don't let that
scare you - if you have gzip you'll want to grab "bloader.gz" and uncompress
it after downloading.

Write an uncompressed copy of the "bloader" file to a 5.25" formatted floppy
using the same method detailed in README_INSTALL for the bootdisk. This will
make your "bloader disk".

Here's how to use the "bloader" disk:

1. Put the 5.25" bloader disk in your boot drive.
2. Put your 3.5" Slackware boot/install disk in your second floppy drive.
3. Boot your machine.

This will load the ramdisk. Once you have the "darkstar:" prompt you may
remove both disks from your machine and continue with the installation.

I sincerely hope this helps!

---
Patrick Volkerding
volkerdi@ftp.cdrom.com
volkerdi@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu