Ok, I'm messing with an OLD computer I have (parts from the late 80's and such) and I'm wanting to run an early version of Slackware on it. I made an bootdisk for Slackware 8.0. Anyway, It's got a really old HD on it (Quantum ProDrive 80AT with 84mb) and I finally got it to read it. So I start it up and it tries to boot MSdos, but there isn't enough memory on the drive so I try to boot Slackware with A:, but it says "General Error reading Drive A:/ Abort, Retry, Fail?" so I retry but nothing happens. I also took another Floppy drive from a different computer and hooked it up (I know this one works) but it does the same thing. What's wrong with it? Is there anything I did wrong that I need to fix? Should I just give up and smash everything with a sledge hammer?

(by the way, I'm messing with this computer for fun.... Nothing I really need)

check your floppy cable. if the light on the drive is on all the time, its backwards. also, some computers need a set of the wires flipped.

Allright... I messed around with the hardware settings and now it will boot MS Dos from the Hard Drive. (Windows Version 3.somthing... lol Old School!)

Edit: The cables were the right way

Likely a bad floppy cable or floppy controller on the drive. Btw, 84mb won't be enough for slack.

hmm... I chose the lowmem one... Maybe I should try an older one if I get the floppy to work?

u're floppy drive is either fucked or can't read 1.44MB disks, allot of old machines only came with 720k drives (my 286 for example), get a new 1.44MB drive and put it in, also make sure ur BIOS is set for a 1.44MB drive, if u can't set it ur fucked and will have to try and use a 720KB floppy.

My floppy drive is okay... I kinda gave up on Slack after about a half hour of waiting for it to boot

What distro could I run?

No no, not older. Just, better suited for your machine. Likely no X window configuration will run well on it, so if you're just going for a straight console box, I'd take a stab at running:

http://dragonlinux.sourceforge.net/
or
http://alcolix.sourceforge.net/

Good luck!

I think some of my hardware is fucked because it gives me a "Divide by Zero" error... But I'll try those lamp