i have an old p1 laptop. got it for free! anyways the previous owner upgraded the floppy dr. to an aftermarket cd drive. worked fine with windows. then i deleted windows and then poped in my red hat disk, DOH! the cd drive isn't recognized. i've tried fighting with the bios and forcing it but to no avail. so then i tried putting the HD into another laptop and loading red hat on it. when i stuck the HD back in the old laptop the start up stalls. so i'm stumped... any ideas out there?

what are the specs on the laptop. What do you mean the cd isn't recognized? what are the errors? where does the startup stall? a little more info would help solving your problem

IBM 760ED 133mhz. when i put a win, or linux cd in it won't boot from it, through dos i would type in [d:install] and it would come back [drive not found] and i tried going into the bios and putting the cd drive as primary source. still didn't work. moving on now that redhat is on the hd, when i boot the comp up it loads and comes up to the os selection screen, i select redhat, then it gets to [booting redhat] the i think it is starting to load the kernel and then just stalls out. hope thats enough info.

I'm just guessing, mind you... From what you have stated, i think the CD drive is not native to your computer, and so requires an installed driver. The old Windoze installation was in place before the CD was installed. When the CD was installed, it probably came with a driver to facilitate its access from Windoze. Now Windoze is gone, and your drive is unusable. That's the first roadblock.

The second one is that your Red Hat was installed on a different machine, and has configured itself to that machine. Different BIOS, different processor, different video adaptor, different everything. It's trying to load itself in a foreign place, so to speak, and can't do it.

This may be a tough nut to crack. My only thought is: can you replace the CD with a floppy drive again, and get a Red Hat boot floppy made that MIGHT then be able to at least boot, and perhaps access the Linux partition on your HD. Then, from there, you may be able to ask a question of a Linux guru on what you can do to configure the kernel that you have already installed. Good luck.

Here's another thought:

Was the drive designation even the same on the computer you used for installing Red Hat onto the HD? If this HD was temporarily attached as the second drive on this other machine, it would be known to Linux as 'hdb' or 'sdb', then it becomes the first drive on the target machine, and so would be 'hda' or 'sda'. This, of course, would be a problem.

And another possible solution: If you can get your hands on another Linux distro, one with more installation options than Red Hat, and if your HD has the capacity, here's what you might try:

Slackware, for example, can install from virtually any media. So, with your HD on a machine that can read an installation CD, you partition this HD; the second partition can even be a FAT partition. Copy the CD files onto this partition, and also make a Slackware boot floppy. Then, with the HD back on the target machine, boot from floppy, mount the HD, and run the Slackware 'setup' program to install from the HD itself.

the drive designation should have been the same. but you're most certinally right, it is probably trying to boot up using my other units config. i'll have to think about what to do from here, the hd in that comp is only 2 gig. and i am really not looking to sink any money into it. i'll see if i can install windows get the driver and see what i can do from there. thanks for the thoughts.