I'm terribly sorry to have shown you this text, especially since it probably really does not help you. I try again and probably we come to a viable proposition.
Really, no apology is necessary. I appreciate all responses to my query that are posted in the spirit of assistance.
You could not boot the CD with slackware-current-mini-install on three computers. Neither on both HOH, nor on the old, but newer Celeron.
It is very unlikely that the optical drives of all three computers to be defective at the same time. Therefore I excluded defective drives. But you have installed Ubuntu on the AMD K6-2 computer. If you can use the drive to read, it's not broken. Also you could try again to boot the Ubuntu CD and thus check of the drive is still working.
As far as I can tell, all the drives are working fine. I have read from them often and receive no error messages, and have successfully booted Puppy Wary 5.5, and AntiX M8.5, from the drives in both K-6 machines in the past week.
For the inabilities to boot, two other reasons may come into question, to my knowledge.
The first reason may lie in burning the CD. If the CD was written at too high speed, then it is usually not readable, i.e. not mountable or bootable. If the CD can not be mounted or read, but other CD's work on this drive, then the CD is bad. Burn then slackware-current-mini-install.iso again, but not faster than 2x or 4x.
I think the CD is OK as well, as this morning I attempted and was able to boot it on my newest x86 machine - Intel E6550 2.33 GHz x 2 - as well is in a virtual machine running Virtual Box on a Mac OS-X host. I have also always been able to list/browse the files from the CD on all machines.
The second reason for the boot deny may be in the BIOS. There are several modes through which the BIOS can boot from CD: "floppy emulation mode", "hard disk emulation mode" and "no emulation mode". In the first mode, the boot information is stored in a FAT floppy image file on the CD. This will be loaded and then used as a virtual floppy. In the second mode, the boot data is part of the CD-structure and be used directly from there. In the latter method, the BIOS must know itself, what to do in order to boot from CD. (all according to my memory, so it can also be somewhat inaccurate)
I don't know how to check which mode is being used; there is nothing in the BIOS on the K6-2 or K6-III machines that specifies or allows one to change this. (I haven't checked the BIOS on the other machines for this.)
The slackware-current-mini-install.iso image has been created by mkisofs command using the switch "-no-emul-boot". Thus an image can be booted on a fairly modern computer. If your HOH BIOS is very old and therefore can not do without emulation, it sees nothing bootable on the CD.
I think this is the problem. The BIOS on the K-6 machines are pre-year 2000.
First you may check if the CD was burned bad and therefore is unbootable. Because you can not boot the CD on a fairly modern Celeron computer, I think mainly on a poorly written CD.
I think, based on what I covered in my responses above, that the CD is OK.
At last but not least, the slackware-current-mini-install.iso image can be booted. I have no computer with AMD K6 CPU. I can boot the image on a computer with AMD Sempron, but that is AMD K8. And I can boot it on Intel Celeron (Pentium III). This is the oldest hardware I own.
Yes, and I experienced the same this morning, as discussed above.
It's all just a matter of proving that the error gapan has pointed to, is already fixed for AMD K6 in Slackware current. Then you could use Salix 14.2 on your HOH later.
I checked the README file for the slackware-current-full iso, and it also indicates that the "-no-emul-boot" switch was used. So it seems like I'm in a Catch-22 situation: although the original issue that did not allow me to boot Salix 14.1 on my old hardware has reportedly been fixed in the new kernel, if the new kernel employs the"-no-emul-boot" switch, I'm still out of luck.
Thanks so much for the detailed, instructive responses.
) the slackware-current-mini-install.iso I found at the link provided above. The CD burned from the iso wouldn't even try to boot; the machines - both of them- didn't recognize it as a bootable CD; they timed out and booted from the hard drive. I even tried in a more modern (but still old) machine, a 1.7GHz Celeron; same result. md5sum checked OK on the iso.
So quickly we do not give up. You can feel lucky, because there is a solution of course. 