I have a brand new Dell Inspiron 518 (shipped with windows vista) that I am trying to install Redhat 9 on from CD (CDs included with Redhat linux 9 bible book).

When I boot from the CD (and choose graphic install) I get past the "english" and "us" prompts ok. However, then I choose "Local CDROM" for the media source question then get stuck as it reports "No driver found". The "Use a driver disk" option doesn't seem to do anything and all of the drivers I've tryed with "Select driver" don't apear to work (dumped back to same screen).

The machine (from windows device info) reports that the CD/DVD driver is from microsoft: "TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-H653F ATA Device" with actual device driver named: "PxHlpa64.sys".

I'm stuck! What to try next?
Any help getting past this would be great!

Thanks,
-Ryan

The machine is much too new for RH9 (which was released in March 2003). If you want something Red Hat like, try the latest Fedora or CentOS (clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

But chances are you're going to have to use a more recent distro. You can also try the latest Ubuntu or suSe, but something in the last year or so will give you the best shot.

with that ancient rh9 .It was released BEFORE most of that NEW hardware was made ( or designed)
so most of the hardware WILL NOT be supported in rh9 . The harddrive may not even work with rh9 .

If you want to stay with Red Hat you can buy RHEL5.2 or download CentOS 5.2 ( free)
or install fedora 10