Installing RH9 on Presario 900: "Cannot find media"

sancho · 09-13-2003, 12:46 PM

I've been trying desperately to get RedHat 9 installed on my Compaq Presario 900 notebook. I have a fresh, bootable RedHat 9 CD-ROM, and it boots the CD with no problems. In fact, it loads the kernel with no problems, and it gets to the blue screen where you tell it where it should get the media (i.e. NFS, FTP, local CD-ROM). Of course, since I have the CD already in the drive, I tell it to find the media on the local CD-ROM. However, whenever I do that, it just comes back saying that it cannot find the media (even though the CD is in the drive). I have tried burning more CDs, but no luck. In fact, it doesn't even look like it's trying to seek the CD, because it doesn't even spin up.

Based on what I've read, a common remedy to installation problems on Laptops is to make a new startup diskette with a custom kernel. The only problem is, my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive--just the DVD/CD-RW drive. So it almost seems like I'm up a creek.

Any ideas as to what I can do?

Thanks!

SPECS:

Compaq Presario 900
Athlon XP 1900+
ATI Radeon 320 IGP
512 MB RAM
40 GB Hard Drive
DVD/CD-RW drive

zvandiver · 09-13-2003, 02:58 PM

I don't have a direct answer to your problem, but here are two things you can try. First, disable legacy USB in the BIOS. This won't affect you CDROM problem, but it can stop the rest of the installation. Second, try SuSE 8.2 or the newest Mandrake. There seem to be fewer installation issues with those distros than with RH. I have SuSE 8.2 on a Presario 2170US very similar to your 900, and had no installation hangups.
Zane

fulian · 09-15-2003, 11:57 AM

I have the same problem and the same laptop.

I created another partition on my harddisk and copied the RH-CDs on this partition. However I did not try installing form there yet, if this solution works, because I have no backup of my data yet.
I rember that you can choose harddisk partitions as source of packages.

Maybe this works.

Let me know if you try. Good luck

rasta · 10-29-2003, 06:06 PM

hey hey, If some people still haven't been able to set up their compaq presario 900 series with RedHat 8, 9 or Mandrake 9, 9.1, 9.2 or Slackware 9.1 ...

boot with the following params: 'linux nomce noauto nousb', this should fix everything for install...

If you still have questions, first look at google/linux and search for presario 900, you'll find a lot of information... or ask me...