*old post edited out

ok
i have decided what to do
i have a computer we will call "school" (because it is at school)
and one called "home" (because it is at home)

the hard drive from the school computer is now formatted with just fat32, and i want to have redhat 8 on it with grub
cd drive doesnt work for school computer

at my home computer, i have hda with win2k, hdb with redhat 8, and grub

what i am planning on doing is putting the hard drive from the school computer into my home computer, installing redhat without any boot stuff, and making a boot disk
then i would put the hard drive back in the school computer and boot it with the disk, then fix the boot info

my questions are:
1. on the home computer, does the mbr just say like "hey, look at /boot for the info" and i should replace the win2k hd with the school one for setup? (no free ide slots)
2. does the boot disk in setup make a path dependent boot disk? (ie like it would make the boot disk for /dev/hda only)
3. how do i setup grub on the school computer, once the hard drive is in and i boot with the boot disk? is there an installer on one of the redhat iso's, or do i have to download a package or eh?

thanks for any help

try making a bootdisk. Should be an images folder on the first disk. Make a boot disk from that.

And you won't really want to install Linux on a FAT32 system. Make it its own partition. And installing linux on a different system and taking the drive to the new one won't work too well. You'll find that a lot of the modules will need reconfiguring to the new system specs, unless they are identical. It will boot (probably) but there will be some things that wont work (in my experience).

I'd be very hesitant to move hard drives around liek that. Not because I'm afraid of the insides of a computer, but you're installing an operating system in a "false" environment.

I tried that with Windows once (and ONLY once). After I installed Windows on the drive and placed it back into the CD-less computer, chaos ensued. I've never SEEN the "Found New Hardware" wizard pop up so many times. After rebooting something around 5 times it had finished wretching and it was never very stable. Stuff kept flaking out on me.

Linux may be different, but I will just about guarantee you that you will have SOME kind of problem at some point. Maybe I'm just paranoid though...

Since you're not afraid to open up your case, I'd suggest taking your CD drive and installing it in your school computer. Then you can install it properly.

hrmm
i was thinking about taking a cd drive to the school
the school computer actually has 2 cd drives in it right now though

the drives were working when windows was on it before, but now bios detects the cdroms, and linux cd says the cdrom doesnt exist (in eaither) and win2k cd says it could not load the cd

i know the cds are fine, so i dont know what is wrong :\

Ok, egg on my face... I didn't quite read the original post all the way through. Let me answer your original questions first.

First, I agree with lopoetve, don't install linux on a FAT32 partition. I'd re-partition the disk if that's an option.

1) The MBR on a drive contains a small program responsible for loading a kernel or a boot loader (like LILO or GRUB). The MBR resides in the first sector of the boot drive and has no direct understanding of any filesystem (/boot, C:, or anything else). It simply points to another specific location on the drive to load the kernel or boot loader. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong...

2) Using the distribution's boot disk creator would make a boot disk specific for that install. In other words, if you installed RH8 on /hdb, then the boot disk would try to mount the root filesystem from hdb.

3) Once you get the machine to boot into linux, then make sure you have an appropriate grub.conf file. Then you'd run:
/sbin/grub-install /dev/hda

That assumes the drive is the primary IDE drive of course.


Now, as for the CD-ROM drives not working, there's not enough information to know for sure. If BIOS detects them, then it's not a cabling/connection problem. Now, when you say windows can't load the CD, do you mean it won't let you browse the linux distrubution CD? Do you see the CD drives in My Computer?

When you say "linux cd says the cdrom doesn't exist" do you mean that you were able to boot the linux install CD?

i was never planning on installing linux on fat32, i was just saying that is what is on it right now :P

let me clarify the cd thing
bios recognizes the cd rom drives as in it lists them when starting up, and in bios setup shows them, etc

but what i meant by "linux cd says the cdrom doesn't exist" was that when i have the linux installer cd in, bios (or whatever) says the cdrom doesnt exist when it tries to read it
(??, i would get you the exact message, but i am not at school anymore :\. with the linux cd in, it says something like "could not load _____, no cd drive". when the windows cd is in, it just says like "could not load")

so the bios recognizes that the drives are there, but it cannot load the installers for eaither win2k or linux
so something is fishy, since i know the cds are fine

Well, I'm not sure where to point you from here. If the CDs boot in another computer, then the only thing I can think would be that there's some physical problem with the CD drives.

A drive does not have to be 100% functional to respond to BIOS. And from what you say, it sounds as though the drive is incapable of reading from the discs.

Could you take one of the drives and connect it to your home machine? If you get the same bad behavior at home, then I'd say you've got a bad CD drive(s). You could also try replacing one of the school's drives with your home CD drive.

I don't know bud; I'm sort of grasping at straws. Can anybody else think of something to try?

normally the first thing i would do would be try replacing a cd drive, but i dont see how both would fail all of a sudden
especially since they were working before

but since bios recognizes the drives, the cds work, and the drives should work, i have no idea what to do eaither :P

which is why i posted hehe

check cabling. A loose cable can make it identifiable to bios, but non-functioning. Try new cables too.

You definately don't want to install and then move the drive. While you won't get as many "new device found" messages, kudzu will throw a fit for certain. things just won't work as well as they should. Try a new CD drive too.

i have the hard drive here right now
but i also just got a new 48x cd burner :P
i will try just taking my old cd burner to the school tommorow and see if i cant get that to work out at all

if not i will be back with more questions, hehe
but thanks so far for the help everyone

no prob. Good luck!

uh oh
so i installed my old cdrw drive at the school computer, and of course it has the same message, which is:

"ISOLINUX 1.75 2002-06-14 isolinux: Loading spec packet failed, trying to wing it...
isolinux: Failed to locate CD-ROM device; boot failed."

so, i have no ideas
do you?
thanks

the mbr wouldnt have anything in it about booting from cdrom devices, would it?
like when linux was setup before it told mbr to look at /boot stuff for cdrom?
i would think that would be hdd only, but this is strange

I'm getting a similiar error message--

I am trying to install RH8 on an older PII-MMX 400MHz. I am trying to boot from CD and after I power the thing on it goes through the boot sequence then:
--then it freezes.

ugh. I have searched a little bit through Google and found one post discussing this same issue and their diagnosis (which I can't find again unfortunately) was that the system was unable to open such a large boot image...?..

Can anybody shed a little more light on this...what is the boot sequence 'protocol' for a computer powering on...i mean first it loads the the CMOS, then the BIOS then FAT.... or what is the correct chain of events?