Problem booting new Slackware 4.0 install

[Kaspan]

Hi!
I'm completely new to this forum and pretty much a novice in linux.
I just installed Slackware 4.0 on an old laptop (Pentium 1 100Mhz 16MB RAM 1g+ HD), dual boot with win98. It used to run Red Hat 4.0 dual boot and that worked fine.
The installation went cleanly, but I haven't managed to start it up properly. The system checks detects and checks the hda partitions and then:

mount /dev/hda4 on / type ext2 (rw)
mount /dev/hda2 on /home type ext2 (rw)
none on /proc type proc (rw)
--> (system hangs)

When I boot a ramdisk through loadlin everything works fine and it has no trouble mounting /dev/hda4. However, none of the files in var/log show anything except for some gibberish in utmp.
Changing the fstab file (taking off dev/hda2 or even proc) doesn't really change anything.

Can anybody help me? Should I just re-install?
Thank you!

[Dapper Dan]

Hi Kaspan and welcome to the forums. Slackware 4 is really ancient...(conjure images of Devonian seas teaming with trilobites) I doubt many here even remember Slackware 4, let alone would know how to help with your problem. I don't even know of anyone who still uses ext2. I could be wrong, we'll see. You may want to consider upgrading to something newer. I don't think Slackware 12 would be in order as it would need more space to install over what you have. You might want to look at Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, DeLi Linux or some distro along those lines. Good luck with whatever you decide.

By the way, where did you locate a copy of Slackware 4?

[Kaspan]

As to why I chose Slackware 4.0:
distribution for pentium 1 with 16 MB RAM - LinuxQuestions.org


As to where I got it:
ftp://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/ (I think...)

The problem with anything newer is that I'll have to repartition my hd for it. I chose Slack 4 not just through the link above but by going down through the readmes until I found a distro matching my space + quality limitations (600 mb, X , emacs, teX, development tools (c C++ lisp perl python etc.)

[bidi]

Well, that's tough, cause it could just be a bug that occurs on your hardware that has already been fixed a very long time ago. The post reference on your reply is from 2004, which is already 4 years old.

Have a look into DeLi Linux, it used to be built on Slackware (I don't think it is anymore) but it's made for this type of hardware and should be compatible enough to Slackware that you won't feel out of place.

As for your requirements, that's also pretty tough. Emacs itself is huge, and development tools on such an old machine might be a pain.