help upgrading RH9 to Fedora
 

I am running RH9 and trying to upgrade or install Fedora 2. I have four disks from the Sobell book, isbn 0-13-147024-8.

I can't seem to boot from the CD: Is it ok to have the cd drives at hda and hdb (and the harddrives at hdc and hdd)? RH9 didn't care.

As an alternative to low-level install, I tried "upgrading" using ALL the files on the first two disks, having built a little script:

$ wc -l /raid/Fedora/RPMS/install.sh
884 /raid/Fedora/RPMS/install.sh

as follows,

$ head -6 /raid/Fedora/RPMS/install.sh
rpm --install -vh 4Suite-1.0-1.0.a3.1.i386.rpm \
a2ps-4.13b-37.i386.rpm \
abiword-2.0.5-1.i386.rpm \
acl-2.2.7-5.i386.rpm \
acpid-1.0.2-6.i386.rpm \
alchemist-1.0.33-1.i386.rpm \

It fails with beaucoup dependency errors; even after copying all four disks into the dir:

$ ls -l /raid/Fedora/RPMS | wc -l
1626

This is a braindead approach, I'm sure; but I red the RH book on RPMs without finding a sensible filelist. Where are the secret filelists? Or must I untangle the device problem and use anaconda?

Thanks in advance,
paul

Your system BIOS is probably complaining about booting with CD drives at hda and hdb with your hard drives at hdc and hdd. (I suspect you would get better disk performance if you made your HDDs the IDE masters, and kept your CD drives as IDE slaves.)

Try creating a floppy boot installation disk from the floppy images on your install CDs.

Here is an article that does a good job of covering alternative methods of installing Fedora:
http://www.samspublishing.com/articl...69466&seqNum=2

Thanks! I fixed the cd locations and got it to burn and boot however, it fails after reading initrd.img. Sometimes it manages to print "Ready" immediately before blinking out and rebooting. I suspect hardware or BIOS again, as this is a new box (built around an ASUS P4P800 SE).

Are there any BIOS settings I need to know about?

Thanks again,
paul

try passing the kernel the "ide=nodma" argument.

There should be directions about how to do this on the screen that you see when
you boot boot from your install CD. It is probably something like:
1) press tab (or F1)
2) type linux ide=nodma

Thanks. Tried that. And in many permutations with

linux [text, rescue, noprobe, nofb]

It falls down every time after printing

initrd.img............................
Ready

Knoppix 3.3 boots fine.
paul