HELLO ALL,

I am a Linux newbie but an going through training. I have a copy of the REDHAT Linux 6.3 CD from class. I bought a new HP Envy cpu with 4Gig Ram, 2TB HD, Win 8.
I also added two 1TB drives so I can have windows using 1/2 of the 2TB disk and Linux setup on the second 1/2 of the 2TB disk. So I can RAID the Linux side.
I rebooted the cpu and hit F10 to change the configruation so that the cpu would boot to the DVD/CD drive first.

I put the dvd in the dvd drive and proceded to finish rebooting. Waiting for the cpu to read the DVD HOWEVER this NEVER occured. The Dvd is working as I have used windows to do a recovery disk set.

Question: Why and how do I get my DVD Drive to read the redhat disk so I can setup the cpu for DUAL BOOTING?

Hope I am placing this question in an ok forum.

Thank you,
cajunchief

From your description, your DVD was not available to the drive until after the restart process had begun. I suggest you put the DVD in the drive, THEN restart and change the boot order.

Sorry no the dvd was in the drive before I completed the boot process. In fact it was in the dvd drive before I actually started the boot process. Yet the dvd drive did not go and read the dvd.

Verify the download with an md5 check, Instructions should be on the Red Hat page.
Burn the downoaded iso file as an image with whatever burning software you use. Copying it as data won't work.

In order to use Red Hat and get any updates, you need to pay a subscription on an annual basis. Depending upon what you plan to use it for, you may be better off using CentOS.

Assuming the DVD is good and boots on other PCs since you got it from your class that the problem is UEFI secure boot related. Fortunately, I do not have any PCs with UEFI secure boot yet so I do not have any first hand experience. See what happens when you press F9 for the boot menu and select the DVD drive. If that does not work then you have to disable secure boot. It didn't appear that you had to use legacy BIOS mode. I also do not know if 6.3 has any UEFI limitations.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...s&dlc=en&lc=en

I agree with michaelk, I think you need to enable CSM compatibility mode in the UEFI to boot some DVDs.

Not aimed at you, but I'm getting pretty disguested with the number of people I see here who have been given an old of date OS for school or some class. Its worse with Red Hat, as you cannot get updates unless you subscribe.

Too late now, but I dont really trust any places or people who do things like that.....

For future refernce, its better to list the full model number, not just 'HP envy'. The HP envys are particually bad, as there are both laptops and desktop systems sold under that branding.

But a HP with win 8 'out of the box' will be using 'secure boot'. You'll have to go into your BIOS/UEFI and turn off secure boot, or else you'll never be able to load an OS without secure boot support.

Only for distros/OSes that wil not boot with UEFI at all. As far as I know RHEL 6.3 will boot with UEFI, though there might be issues with some UEFI systems.

Umm...that doesnt quite make sense to me.

Do you have 1 x 2TB HDD and 2 x 1TB HDDs? Or have you just partitioned a 2TB HDD into 2 x 1TB partitions?

In any case, I wouldnt bother with RAID. RAID 1 is almost pointless IMO, you're better off using the 2nd drive as a backup. RAID 0 can seem to be a good idea in some ways, but its not worth it either IMO. Its more risky, and not that much faster. If you really have a need for speed, a decent SATAIII SSD on a SATAIII port will be way faster than any RAID 0 setup with current standard HDDs.

I was reading that as RHEL - which would make it quite current. But it is a server, and typically is behind the ball for "latest-and-greatest" hardware support.

To All,

Very interesting comments, I like a lot of what you said let me reply like this:

- If that does not work then you have to disable secure boot.
* I have gotten the secure boot disabled and it hasn't helped yet, still working on that issue.

- I agree with michaelk, I think you need to enable CSM compatibility mode in the UEFI to boot some DVDs.
* I haven't read about CSM Compatability but I will look into it. And see if it helps.

- For future refernce, its better to list the full model number, not just 'HP envy'. The HP envys are particually bad, as there are both laptops and desktop systems sold under that branding
* I actually bought a Desktop to add more drives. Yea it probably is a POS, but it's all I could afford.

- Only for distros/OSes that wil not boot with UEFI at all. As far as I know RHEL 6.3 will boot with UEFI, though there might be issues with some UEFI systems.
* I hadn't heard of UEFI until this cpu, will look into it to see if Redhat supports it.

- Umm...that doesnt quite make sense to me. Do you have 1 x 2TB HDD and 2 x 1TB HDDs? Or have you just partitioned a 2TB HDD into 2 x 1TB partitions?
* I have a HP Envy with 1 2TB drive as default. I have added to additional 1TB disks. Partitioning the 2TB disk will give windoze 1TB and then Linux 1TB.

- In any case, I wouldnt bother with RAID. RAID 1 is almost pointless IMO, you're better off using the 2nd drive as a backup. RAID 0 can seem to be a good idea in some ways, but its not worth it either IMO. Its more risky, and not that much faster. If you really have a need for speed, a decent SATAIII SSD on a SATAIII port will be way faster than any RAID 0 setup with current standard HDDs.
* As to wether or not Raid is the right strategy the problem is the SSD drives I could afford was only 250GB. well short of the 1TB I want.
when they get bigger then I can throw one in!

Thanks for your replys I have some research to do. I'll let you know how it works. HOPE I can get it working.

Its basicly 'BIOS mode'. As far as I know it doesnt exist on all UEFI systems.

Nah, I didnt mean 'bad' as in 'envys suck!', I meant 'bad' as in 'its really hard to know what system the poster is talking about'.

This might help-

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/down...DocID=HT075591

The SSD comment was for if you wanted to use RAID 0 for faster speeds. I still dont know if yuo are trying to use RAID 0 or RAID 1.

I'd guess that you are planning on using 'fake RAID' (motherboard software RAID) for windows. That might 'lock' the 2TB drive to fakeRAID, which generally has awful or zero linux support. I dont think your RAID system will work. I'm hardy an expert on RAID, and fakeRAID I do my best to avoidm, so I might be wrong.

I dont think its worth it anyway....if its RAID 0, performance is likely to be not much better than a single drive (and you only use RAID 0 for performance). If its RAID 1, why do you want 2 HDDs both with 1TB or storage?

You can setup linux so it can 'see' and read/write to a windows NTFS file system.

IMO if you must have a RAID 1 setup, I'd use linux software RAID (mdadm) for the 2 x 1TB drives, then copy any data you want to 'see' with windows to the 2TB drive.

But personally, I wouldnt even bother with that, I'd pull 1 of the 1TB HDDs to use it externally, set it up a single NTFS partition, then write any data you want backed up to that drive from both windows and linux.

Before you go ahead and start messing with BIOS and trying to install and run Red Hat to your hard drive might I suggest you look into using a virtual machine. You could use the free VMWare player or VirtualBox and have Red Hat as virtual machine running inside your windows 8 install. That would negate the need for chancing BIOS settings and would allow you to use Windows while you play with Red Hat in the VM.
If you were wanting to run a desktop-orientated version of Linux things might be different but as it is I think a VM might be the quickest and easiest way to play with Red Hat.

Before you go ahead and start messing with BIOS and trying to install and run Red Hat to your hard drive might I suggest you look into using a virtual machine. You could use the free VMWare player or VirtualBox and have Red Hat as virtual machine running inside your windows 8 install. That would negate the need for chancing BIOS settings and would allow you to use Windows while you play with Red Hat in the VM.
If you were wanting to run a desktop-orientated version of Linux things might be different but as it is I think a VM might be the quickest and easiest way to play with Red Hat.
__________________

I understand what you had to say. However, I want just the opposite. I want a box that runs LINUX and can run Windoze 8 in the VM. I eventually want to start a company
using ONLY Linux, and have only 1 windoze license for any special translation stuff the company may need to do. Believe me when I say I can't wait to NOT need windoze at ALL.

cajunchief

If you want a desktop Linux I would suggest trying Fedora instead of Red Hat. It may break more often but it will be more likely to support any more modern hardware you may use.
As for running Windows 8 in a VM -- that's easy as long as you have an install disk and as long as you're not planning to play games or do other things reliant upon specifi8c hardware then my experience it that it works very well.
Good luck to you.

If you want a desktop Linux I would suggest trying Fedora instead of Red Hat. It may break more often but it will be more likely to support any more modern hardware you may use.
As for running Windows 8 in a VM -- that's easy as long as you have an install disk and as long as you're not planning to play games or do other things reliant upon specifi8c hardware then my experience it that it works very well.
Good luck to you.

I have used Ubuntu on another cpu and am trying to get the Redhat Linux working so I can complete the classes I am taking.

cajunchief

Suggestion: Talk to your instructor about using CentOS instead of RHEL. (I suspect that the instructor is in violation of the schools license when he distributed that RHEL DVD. It contains some copyrighted material.) The advantage of the CentOS is that is a copy (now supported by Red Hat as an in-house project) of the non-copyrighted parts of the current RHEL distribution, as a FOSS distribution.

About the RAID: I have a Fedora 20 installation on a single partition, and a Fedora 21 one on a RAID-1 pair of partitions (using mdadm) on two different drives, and the mirrored system is often twice as fast as the single-drive system. (Both systems are using etx4 file systems.)

On the other hand, if you're interested in data safety in a large shop (after you get your business going ), look at the Logical Volume Management system, and the snapshot backups you can do with it. (The btrfs automates the backup process, but, when I tried it on a volatile system, all the hard links "ate" 1.5Tb of my 2Tb test array in about two months. I think it could be better tuned, but I didn't want to struggle with that, so I dropped - for now - that file system.)