Damn you dell!
 

Need some assistance here prior to install- Hopefully someone can help:

I am pretty au fait with most dist installs and I wanted to run deb at home beside my redhat box to learn a little about it.

Anyways I bought a PC from ebay (UK) for the install. It is a Dell Optiplex GN+ with no OS or CD-ROM. I removed my CD rom from my redhat box and slotted it in.

heres the problem - I can't get my boot disk to recognise the CD rom:

I have tried win 95 - 2000 boot disks, specialist boot disks from www.bootdisk.com and others directly from Dell with no luck. I have checked the cables and Eide slot and both are OK. I have upgraded the BIOS to the lastest version.

Anyone had this problem before and got a solution for me?


The only thing I think is left is to create a boot disk with DOS and TCP/IP on it and try and install the dist via the home lan but that's a little out of my league.

Any help with this evil Dell box gratefully recieved :)

Cable select jumpers?
Failing that, try putting the CD drive back inthe RH box, does it work? Maybe its just dead.
Jim

The cd rom works - have tested

This is odd... I'm sitting in front of a Dell Optiplex Gn+.

I'm at work at a library where I don't really have my own "machine" so I found this to be somewhat of a bizarre coincidence.

I just finished booting it into toms rtbt to see if it would react weird (mobo issues was what I was trying to rule out). It booted fine and got the cdrom and the HD. Needless to say you've gotten a Deb kernel boot disk to work, right? What was the dmesg, specifically did it catch the ide channel at all? does it ever see the drive? Wait, I just though of something... gonna have to reboot to look.

I thought it may have had a stupid bios that only enabled the primary IDE by default. Yes, this thing exists, it was on a Micronics PPro board. I hate it. Regardless... If Redhat found it, then it almost surely isn't the cdrom being weird.

Are you trying to boot from the cdrom? Or from a floppy?

Sorry all of those questions are rather haphazard...

Cheers,

Finegan

floppy :(

rather strange deal.


Here's what I would do


put the cdrom in the redhat box

mount the install cd

make the cd folder the www root folder and do a http install.

this is assuming you can do an http install with that distro.

if not maybe set it up for ftp.

Nice idea except there is no OS on the dell whatsoever :( IE there is no way of ftp/http down the iso unless anyone can point me in the direction of a wonderdisk?

Is there no netboot disk image.


I know redhat has a boot image for a floppy that will do it.

Yeah I was using a Redhat 7.1 floppy boot disk but it wasn't seeing the CDROM either :(

No what Mr. Phillips is sugesting is that you skip the cdrom problem altogether for now and do a network install. There is a network boot floppy somewhere on that Redhat CD that you can boot off of instead of the normal boot floppy and then install the entire system via a LAN, assuming this machine and the Suse box are networked, or straight off the net, assuming you either have broadband or the patience of Job. Although, reading about Britain's broadband roll-out, the former of those last two possibilities seems slim. If you've already swapped that cdrom half a dozen times, the latter seems much more possible.

Cheers,

Finegan

If this is indeed what might do the trick, I can figure out where the wonderdisk image is this evening, (Work sucks) if no one else points it out before then.

ROFL


I've actually had dsl for nearly a year: I download iso's for distributions all the time :)

OK so what I need is a network floppy boot image, then I can either ftp down the iso's or grab them from one of the other servers on my home lan :)


Now all I need is that disk . . . :)

Edit:>

Guess this is what I need

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...t-bootdsk.html

Searching redhat for bootnet.img now

Edit2:> For reference:


Got it from ftp.mirror.ac.uk

/sites/ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.2/en/os/i386/images

Good Grief:
 

I finally got round to trying the install fromm the network boot disk from redhat.

Things went great for a little while: The system booted up, discovered an IP address/subnet and appeared to download a 6 meg file from ftp.redhat.com.


I then chose workstation install and got to the disk druid part of the redhat install when the install died stating that is couldn't find the hard disk?? The same disk I assume it downloaded the file from redhat to?

Anyways I retried the install and the same thing happened.

I tried to run fdisk from a bootdisk I have and it now can't see the main disk :(

I think I've been shafted when I bought this machine from ebay :(

you want me to go slap Mr Dell for you.. i live like 1/10 of a mile from Dell headquarters... :D

Okay, this is oddly enough beginning to sound a lot like the exact same problem this writer for The Register was having when he wanted to do an install comparison between RH and XP. Dell's have had the preponderance to have every drive in the crate jumpered for CS, cable select... its an easy way to save $.50 by not having some guy on the line have to re-jumper every drive that comes in. This is kinda a longshot, but you might want to crack open the box and check to see if the CD-rom is jumpered for CS, and if the HD is as well, although that will require looking up its jumper settings on wherever it came from. If its offhand a Quantum, you can wiggle support out of the Maxtor page who swallowed them back in February.

Cheers,

FInegan