Hi, i'm trying to install madrake 10.1. I have download the 3 iso images, checked them against md5 and burned them to cd's.

1st try was to boot from CD1 and install, however the installation boots then says no cdrom found. It asks to put a floppy in to load drivers but i have no floppy so then it gives a list of available drivers of which none seem to work. Have also tried the same booting from CD2. This is to do with my IDE controller i thnk as i have tried 3 different cdroms and get the same problem everytime.

2nd try was to install from my fat32 partition on my hard drive.

I have a SATA drive partitioned as follows:
1. 54MB FAT (Primary)
2. 80Gig NTFS (Primary) C:
3. 68Gig Extended (Primary)
. 4. 35Gig FAT32 (Logical) D:
. 5. 6Gig Ext3 (Logical) /
. 6. 1Gig Swap (Logical)
. 7. 26Gig Ext3 (Logical) /home

So i created the hd_grub boot disk from cd1 and extracted each iso to D:\CD1, CD2, CD3. Booted from the floppy and set up grub as follows

root (hd0,4)
kernel /CD1/isolinux/alt0/vmlinuz ramdisk_size=128000 root=/dev/ram3 acpi=ht vga=788 automatic=method:disk
initrd /CD1/isolinux/alt0/all.rdz

also tried it like this

root (hd0,3)
kernel /CD1/isolinux/alt0/vmlinuz ramdisk_size=128000 root=/dev/ram3 acpi=ht vga=788 automatic=method:disk,partition=sda4,directory=/CD1
initrd /CD1/isolinux/alt0/all.rdz

plus some variation in between! Each time it says can’t find file so I don’t know what else to try there.

3rd try i created the network boot disk from cd1 and the netword drivers disk it says must accompany it in the readme file. So i booted from this disk and is said something about can't find linux kernel in the syslinux.cfg file and gives a boot: command prompt. Couldn't do anything else from here.

4th try I decided to use the 2.4 kernel to install from the cd’s with the idea of upgrading to 2.6 once installed. The installation worked this time up to a point. I boot into linux and get a kernel panic saying “No init found. Try passing init = option to kernel”. I think this is because the 2.4 kernel is trying to boot from the IDE devices which are a cdrw and dvdrw so will have no luck there. So it is not booting from my sata drive.

If anyone could help resolve any of my attempts here I would be grateful.

I doubt you can copy the files to vfat and think it'll work. In my experience vfat sometimes respect upper/lower case
and sometimes not. And FYI I think grub would see your D: as (hd0,4).

How about removing all but one CD reader during install?

When you created the network floppies, did you use rawwrite to create them?
Did you format the floppies first to make sure they were OK?

- Peder

All the file names for the iso on my vfat partition are in lower case.

I have tried removing all but one cd reader during installation.

Yep, i used rawwrite to create the floppies and formatted them first.

Since my first post I have been able to attempt a net install, however with yet more problems. The net install would have used the 2.6 kernel and because i'm not using the cd i don't get the no cdrom error. What i did get is it doesn't find my SATA hard drive this time!

I can't win. It seems kernel 2.4 will install but not boot and 2.6 will not even install.

See if this thread helps http://mandrakeusers.org/lofiversion...hp/t21248.html

BTW; What MB/SATA-controller do you have?

- Peder