installing Enterprise version 4, not recognizing hard drive
 

Hello,
I'm trying to install Red Hat Enterprise version 4 on a work computer. It's a Dell Precision PWS490 desktop with Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU. I'm booting from the install CDs. When I go through the prompts, it asks if I want to load drivers. We don't have driver disks at work. All of the drivers on the list seem to be for ethernet devices anyway. When I try to skip this step, it does not perform the installation because it says it can't recognize a hard drive. It won't let me do any partitioning either. He has successfully installed Linux from these same install CDs on a similar Dell computer with no problems. I see from other posts that the answer has been that the version of Linux is so old, it doesn't recognize the hardware on the newer computer, but it installed on the other computer fine. He has the giant Linux tome "Linux unleashed" (?) and we didn't see anything in there to help. Any suggestions as to how to proceed??

Also, I find most of the jargon used on these posts unfamiliar, so is there a reference someone can suggest so I can become more literate?

Thank you,
K

Hey,

I bet your hard drives in that server are SATA drives. If so, there may be a setting in the BIOS to configure the SATA drives in either "IDE emulation" mode or "AHCI" mode. I have had problems with RHEL 4 and SATA drives, the solution was setting the BIOS to use AHCI mode. Also, at the Red Hat install boot prompt, try "linux expert". Sometimes some extra drivers are available when using that option (They may even be automatically configured).

Good luck!