I'm wanting to install RH7.2 on a P166. Its motherboard IDE support is dead, and IDE support now comes solely through a Promise Ultra66. A hard drive is on the Ultra66's primary channel and a CD-ROM drive on the secondary channel. I have to boot from an install floppy since the BIOS doesn't support CD booting. The RH installer found the CD-ROM, but when I got to the hard drive partitioning it said there is no device to install a filesystem on. Is there some kind of kernel parameter I can use with the boot floppy so the installer can find the hard drive?

Rh's installer, may be too stupid to look for disk space on a third ide device (although the first two are toast, it probably will still count them).

Or,

Rh's install kernel may not have support for the Promise card in it (although I doubt that). [skip this I'm a moron]

To find out if its the installer being dumb, after the installer loads, Alt+F2 to a shell and try: "dmesg | more" and page through that to see if it found the card, which should be IDE2.

I just read back and realized that it found the CDROM, which should be /dev/hdf, so the hard drive should be /dev/hde. Try text-mode install, or better yet, during the GUI install, use the expert mode, which is good old fdisk, and run fdisk on /dev/hde, which should allow you to partition everything up nicely.

Regardless, when you're all done, you're almost definately going to be chained to a boot floppy unless you can get the BIOS to put the promise card in the boot order, which I doubt.

Luck,

Finegan

I can't seem to get it to let me at a shell, but I did see the PDC chipset number scroll by me during boot. Not to mention the CD does work. I was using the GUI and even when asking for fdisk I'm still told there is no valid device to install a filesystem on.

I should be ok with booting. The corrupted Win95B does boot when no floppy inserted. I don't care about retaining Win95 or any data on the drive. The Ultra66 card masquerades as a SCSI card so that you can boot it even if the motherboard controllers are being used. I also have a real SCSI card for the CD-RW drive and scanner.

Just because the CD booted, doesn't acctually mean the kernel has recognized it, just that BIOS did. Its kinda weird to wrap your head around, but yeah it possible. You might have to try ctrl+alt+F2 to get the heck out of the GUI and see if you can fdisk that puppy, although at this stage I'de really recommend trying a text mode install.

Luck,

Finegan

I started a text-mode install and got into a shell. dmesg wasn't available to me, but /proc/interrupts did list ide3 which should be the promise card (ide1 and ide2, which are dead, were not listed). ide3 landed on IRQ7, which I thought odd but the CD works anyway. Whenever I tried to fdisk, I always got the error unable to open the device. I tried everything possible from /dev/hda onward, and even tried /dev/sda onward but got the same error every time. So for whatever reason(s), the hard drive just can't be accessed, unless perhaps I can use hde=something at the boot: prompt. Perhaps the kernel is expecting /dev/hde to appear where it would if I were using the tertiary IDE controller that some sound cards support but not finding it there.