can't install RHEL 4
 

I'm trying to upgrade a server from RHEL AS 2 to AS 4. This machine has two SCSI drives. /dev/sda houses /, /usr, /var, and /home. /dev/sdb was formatted as software RAID. The first time I tried upgrading from the CDs, the installer froze after reformatting the partitions on /dev/sda. I tried a few more times, each time disabling the network card or telling the installer not to reformat, but the installation would still freeze. I tried again after booting into Knoppix and deleting the software RAID partitions on /dev/sdb. (All the data was backed up anyway.) Now the installation is stuck on "Loading sym53c8xx." I checked online and found tons of posts about sym53c8xx being incompatible with the 2.6 kernel, but no fixes other than installing a distro with the 2.4 kernel or getting a new SCSI controller. Does anyone know of any other solutions? Oracle 10g, which requires the 2.6 kernel, is going to be installed on this server.

Well, I still can't install RHEL 4, but I did install RHEL 5.

Well, great, now it turns out that Oracle isn't certified for RHEL 5, and we don't have a site license for SUSE Enterprise, so I'll still have to figure out how to install RHEL 4.

RedHat should sort this problem out for you, ask for a fixed or patched installation disk. Your organisation is not paying them for support for nothing ;).

Actually, my organization is not paying Red Hat for support. I work for a university that has an academic site license. We get software updates but no support. I could get support from sysadmins in the general IT department, but then my group would probably have to shell out extra money.

What type of RAID controller do you have? Certainly there are some special drivers you can use that will support the lower 2.6.x kernel on RHEL4. Do you happen to see any there? If so, try that.

Harlin Seritt

I no longer have to install RHEL 4 because we got Oracle onto RHEL 5. Once I changed /etc/redhat-release to redhat-4, the Oracle installer was successfully tricked. I had tried Update 4 of RHEL 4 (the version I tried first was Update 3), and it had the same problem with the driver as Update 3.