I was able to boot from my thumb drive!!! I’m working on setting up my hard drive partitions…I encountered problems using syslinux to make the thumb drive bootable and so I didn’t give up and searched for other means to make this work. I came across this software: UNetbootin and you can find it here

unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

for those that perhaps are having problems in making a thumb drive bootable use this alternative and see if it works; it worked for me so hopefully it would be of help. Cheers!

Mark

THanks for your reply…I am running cmd.exe as the admin and it’s still giving me the same error message.

an application has attempted to directly access the harddisk, which is not supported. This may cause the application to function incorrectly. Choose close to terminate the application.

Note: When I choose to “Ignore” —->i get this syslinux: sector read error

Is there an alternate program out there besides syslinux? or i have to change some settings around? Thanks…

Marco

It looks like syslinux.exe was not able to make your USB stick bootable. Did you follow the advice in the tutorial to run the command with administrator rights by running it in a command window (cmd.exe) which has been started as Admiistrator (right-click on the Command Prompt and select “Run as Administrator”)?

Without administrative rights, you will get the errors like “an application has attempted to directly access the harddisk”.

Eric

I have tried to installed Slackware using this tutorial and I have not yet succeeded….the point where i get stuck is the following I have plenty of space in my thumb drive and I have gone through the steps in Option 2 several times. I get stuck in step #6 where i run the following command “syslinux.exe -m -a -d /boot/syslinux d: (d: being my thumb drive) I get the following error—> “an application has attempted to directly access the harddisk, which is not supported. This may cause the application to function incorrectly. Choose close to terminate the application.

Note: When I choose to “Ignore” —->i get this syslinux: sector read error

I have read and did exactly what it says in your tutorial but it won’t boot into the thumb drive. Can you please help. After I set the USBSLACKINS label on the drive i restarted and it won’t boot into setup. I ran the command “syslinux -m -a -d /boot/syslinux d: (d: is my thumb drive) and i got the prompt so I assumed it went through, reboot and it won’t work. Thanks in advance.

Mark

I noticed your examples for mounting /usbinstall are both the same (“mount -t vfat -o ro,shortname=mixed $(/sbin/blkid -t LABEL=USBSLACKINS | cut -f1 -d:) /usbinstall”). I assume the first one was meant to specify the device literally – just confused me for a second, so thought I should point it out

Thanks again