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Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?

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Old 02-28-2008, 01:04 PM   #1
MensaWater
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USB DVD seen by bios but not RHEL5


Is there any command line option I can give at the boot: prompt (e.g. linux noapic…) or any driver I can tell it to use for this?

I’m trying to install a Dell PowerEdge 860 that has an internal CD drive.

In order to speed up installation I wanted to do it with a DVD instead and happened to have a USB DVD drive (also made by Dell for our blade server).

I attached the USB DVD drive and booted the system. The BIOS finds the drive just fine and takes me to the RHEL5 boot: prompt. It continues asking for keyboard type, language etc…

It then loads the ramdisk, drivers etc… but when it gets to the point of checking for installation media it says none found. At the point it says that it ejects the internal CD drive (even though nothing is there) but does not eject the DVD drive. This makes it seem the Linux kernel isn’t seeing the USB DRIVE.

A similar issue had been seen with an old Dell 1300 CD drive a long time back. i.e. BIOS would boot from the CD fine but Fedora wouldn’t recognize that there was a CD when it loaded ramdisk etc… The fix for that was to type “ide=nodma”. I’m hoping there is some option like this or some driver available that I have to explicitly tell it to use and that someone can give me a pointer as to what that might be.

Of course it may be it is simply confused by having both a CD and a DVD drive. Disabling the CD in BIOS didn’t help. I don’t really think it’s a BIOS setting anyway since it does boot the DVD – it is only the Linux (RHEL5) that is puking on having no media present.

During the RHEL5 start up I do see it load the USB-STORAGE driver along with MPTBASE, MPTSAS & ATA-PIIX. (The MPT stuff is the built in SAS for the disk drives.)
 
Old 02-28-2008, 02:26 PM   #2
Lenard
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Quote:
In order to speed up installation I wanted to do it with a DVD instead and happened to have a USB DVD drive (also made by Dell for our blade server).
Sorry the kernel used for installation does not have support for USB devices.

FYI: It is fairly simple to switch the DVD for the CD drive. It just takes a couple of minutes to remove the CD drive and replace with the DVD drive (just a couple of screws on both the USB drive and server).
 
Old 02-29-2008, 10:45 AM   #3
MensaWater
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Well physically removing the DVD from its housing and opening the server to remove its CD and install the DVD would likely not be as fast as installing from the CDs so would defeat the purpose.

When you say "the kernel" do you specifically mean the one in RHEL5?

If so isn't there a way to make a modified version that would allow me to incorporate this driver? I know that for the first time that would take some time but in the long run for multiple installs (and possible future reinstalls) it would save me time.

Do you know WHICH driver is required to allow this? (That is the name of the driver.)

P.S. If the USB isn't supported is the Dell Blade Server treating it as something other than USB given the fact we installed the Blades using this USB DVD?

Last edited by MensaWater; 02-29-2008 at 10:51 AM.
 
  


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