yet another question, one day i may have answers too :P

anywho, Im trying to do a network install of Red Hat 9 from an NFS share, and so far, i have the share, and the server set up perfectly, ready to install. My problem comes when i boot the systems i want the installations on from their boot disks. they boot fine from the boot disks, but when they want the driver for the NIC, i insert it in /dev/fd0, and it briefly scans it and asks me for it again. i have verified that the NICS im using (VIA Rhine II) use the driver im loading for it, and i have actually tried out two, the one the computer im typing on right now uses via-rhine.o just fine, but that doesnt work on the machines im trying to install from the network on, and the other driver is the linux driver that was on the motherboard driver cd, which i had to compile, and the name is drawing blank at the moment. My LAN is set up properly and everything on it is able to see everything else, and all is well but this, any help would be greatly appreciated. I really need to know if this is a hardware or driver issue, or if im not doing the network install correctly. So far ive set up the NFS shares holding the install info, and they are sharing, and all TCP/IP services are running fine, and im booting from a bootdisk i made from the CD images directory.

The problem could be simply that the floppy should be formatted using ext2. I made this mistake when doing a Mandrake install one time. I don't know which file system Red-Hat expects, but this could be the problem.

no, i guess that wasnt it, ive tried it with both ext2 and ext3 floppies. the other driver name is rhinefet.o, for the VIA Rhine II ethernet adapter, it still simply ignores the driver disk when i put it in.

On most linux installs, you can press ctl-alt-F2, and have some kind of a shell where you could manually insmod the the driver. But before the second-stage is loaded, I don't know it this will work.

It could just be asking you for a second driver if you happen to need one, with the first driver being loaded. Press Ctl-Alt-Fn, for the screen that gives status messages during an install. Or if you have a shell interface, type out a module listing using lsmod to see if the module was loaded.

It may be the case that the module was compiled for a different kernel version than that you are booting up with, and there were symbol mismatches, so the insmod command failed. If your boot floppy has an initrd file, you might need to decompress it, mount it as a loopback file-system, and change an insmod command to use the -f (force) option. I think the script that the first-stage install is using is called linuxrc. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

well, i got it, i just used a slackware network driver boot disk and it worked out just fine. strange though...