RH is not booting past pcmcia.
 

I have just installed RH 7.2 on an old Toshiba Satellite 2510CDS that I got very cheap.



The install went ok, no problems that I could see. But when I went to start for the first time is just stops loading at pcmcia.







I was hoping that someone may have come across this in the past and will be able to fill me in on an answer or workaround.







Thank you in advance.

Poking around www.linux-laptops.net, I didn't find anything on that exact model, but one minor version above is an install with a 2.4 kernel like RH 7.2's. RedHat is using the in-kernel PCMCIA driver package which suffers from two major problems: It is still in its infancy really, and it doesn't handle older hardware that well.

You should be able to boot with the boot floppy you made during install, find a boot disk on a floppy and take pcmcia out of Init, or simply re-install with no PCMCIA support (and make sure to do a custom install and choose the subsections Developer). Then you can compile pcmcia-cs, the older pcmcia card services package, as a separate entitiy, which is ironclad.

Or, you could install an older distro, which is the easiest way to get better performance out of older hardware.

Cheers,

Finegan

try sending the kernel arg
init=/bin/bash
to your bootloader
once booted to the shell
type mount -oremount rw /
edit your /etc/inittab file to default to runlevel 1
reboot, you may have to FORCE it to reboot
remove init=/bin/bash from the bootloader
boot, run setup and uncheck pcmcia
edit /etc/inittab and reset default runlevel to whatever you want it to be
reboot and try again
hope this helps, cheers
p.s. plz email me if it works, i did this for resetting the domain name when it wouldn't get past sendmail at boot, cheers