Mandrake 10.0 Community installation - boot floppy fails at reckognizing SCSI CDROM

This happened so far:

Created cdrom.img on a boot floppy, because I can't boot the Mandrake 10.0 community CD from my SCSI CDROM. Also, I read in install.txt that older SCSI isn't supported, so I followed the advice & copied aha7xxx.ko & scsi_mod.ko to a second floppy so that I'd have the drivers
ready when asked for them.

When I boot from floppy I type F1 & slect "linux noauto" . Message coming up that CDROM device is not recognized. OK. then I'm asked to insert a driver floppy, so I put my SCSI modules, but I get the reply: "Doesn't seem to be a driver disk".
This is strange, since on the same box I have an old RH 7.3 & SUSE 9.0 installed
with aha7xxx being the exact module for my SCSI host adapter family. Also, the scsi_mod.ko
is listed as dependency in the module.dep file for the mandrake 2.6 kernel.
The mandrake 10.0 sounds so promising as distro, but how to get it installed ?
Someone has enough experience to help with this ? Thanks

I also have the exact same problem. I'm trying to install the 10.0 official version and ran into the same problem. Installer boots up fine but complains that it cannot find my SCSI CD-ROM (Toshiba XM-6401B). If you found a solution to your problem, please let me know.

Maybe this booting utility might help? Dunno, I'm a linux n00b myself

Smart Bootmanager

I've found the utility to be excellent, as I seem to have trouble to get an O/S to boot off my cd, but with that utilty, it works. An it's open source too (yay!)

hello thanks for posting.

one warning : The Smart Bottmanager does only allow to boot from IDE CDROM,
(see on recommended link from above posting)
so because we had trouble with our SCSI CDROM drives I finally tried it this way:

1. Copied the first three installation CD's in a directory called /mandrake on the harddisk where I have SUSE installed.

2. Created a bootdisk for installation from harddisk called "hd_grub.img" from the Mandrake CD

3. Booted with the hd_grub floppy & edited path to the harddisk & directory where I put the copies of the Mandrake
installation CD's.

4. Installation starts, only at the point where it says cannot red partition table I had to do
CTR_ALT_F2 in order to get a console & make device nodes for all my existing SCSI drives:

# mknod /dev/sr0 b 11 0
# mknod /dev/sr1 b 11 0

& then back to the graphical installation with CTRL_ALT_F7

After that it could read from partition table without giving error message.
By the way, the bug with the partition table reading is meantioned on the ERRATA
for the Mandrake 10.0 community. Maybe the bug is handled in the official issue.

The rest was easy. I let install GRUB for booting Mandrake & after i could boot into the new 10.0 installation
I added my existing systems to /boot/grub/menu.lst

Comment: installation from harddisk isn't so dumb as I first thought. Depending on your processor & CDROM speed the copy goes quit fast. Only other requirement is of course enough free space on hd for the mandrake copies (ca 2 GB) The advantage is: While copying teh CD's to hd you already have a control if all your CD files are integer. If it copies nice to hd then it installes well after.

First of all, thanks for the post.

I currently have Windows 2000 installed on the m/c on which I'm trying to install Mandrake and get rid of Windows altogether. I did try the 'mknod' trick mentioned in the errata. However, CTRL_ALT_F7 did not take me back to the graphical installer. Installation hung at that point.

In addition to the SCSI CD-ROM, I also have a SCSI HDD. I think I'll try doing 'mknod' for the HDD also and see if that works.

You mention that, "I added my existing systems to /boot/grub/menu.lst". What is this? If I successfully install Mandrake 10, do I need to do something like that?

I tried to install from my SCSI CD-ROM using the 'mknod' tricks mentioned in the errata. But no joy!! Then, when I was dabbling through these forums I found a link to a post which explained in detail (very excellent article) how to install Mandrake from FTP. I tried that and was successful the very first time. Big thanks go to the person who posted that message.

Thanks everybody for the help.