I just received Red Hat Nine for Dummies with publisher's edition CD's. Disk one does not boot, does not have dosutils directory or img directory. Only has Red Hat rpm's. How can this be installed? The book says CD should boot but I don't understand how since I do not see .img files or kernal???
I,m lost! Hope someone can help. Dave

Is your BIOS set to boot CD before hard drive?

Yes it is and Mandrake 8.1, 9.1 and RH 7.2 all will boot. This cd will not boot in Linux computer or my W98 (YUK!) box.

That is what made me look at directories. This cd does not have any for the normal files at the start of the disk.

It looks like this:
(folder) RedHat
(file) .discinfo
(file)Eula
(file) Gpl
(file)Readme
(file)RPM-GPG-KEY
(file)Trans.tbl

wehereas RH 7.2 has

(folder)dosutils
(folder)images
(folder)RedHat
(file).disc-i386
(file)autorun
(file)boot
(file)copying

See the difference mainly the autorun and boot files!!

Still lost: Dave

Udate: I have downloaded the bootdisk.img from RH . I get the boot ok, get all the way to start install and it says I do not have a Red Hat CD in the drive. I also tried to do a media verify using "linux mediacheck" and I get the same boot and result. Someone help?!

I finally got the answer. The CD's are numbered in reverse. CD2=CD1, CD1=CD2. CD2 does in fact boot!

Well...that would explain it Thanks for letting us know what happened.

LMAO I was wondering if anyone else would have this problem. I bought the same book about 4 months ago and had the same deal. CD 2 is actually CD 1 and the boot CD.

FX

Another question for FX. Did you ever get an install? I have tried on 2 machines that will run Mandrake 8.1 and both times at the start of installing packages it errors out saying " You are trying to install on a machine not supported by this version of Red Hat". Back to Mandrake

Never had that problem. I do know that the specs for RH 9 are pretty hefty. I have a 1 gig celeron and 256 ram in my server and the gamer is a XP 1700+ with 512 DDR. I think for RH 9 they suggest 128 meg ram at the very least. That might be some of your problems I am not for sure.

FX

Wow. This blunder must have scared many newbies off from ever using Linux.

I am going to try again. I am supposed to receive a new Motherboard today for a new build. It will be a MSI K7TM Pro micro board, 1.2 G Athlon Thunderbird, 256M, 10G -7200rpm WD drive, 8m Acel AGP graphics, SB audio card, USR Ext 56k modem.
If my copy of RH9 does not work on this one I have SuSe 8.2 coming, and I have Mandrake 9.1 and 8.1 in reserve. Wish me luck on this venture. I also am gathering parts for a PII server with SCSI drives in an old AT case using a Asus P2L-B Motherboard. Will try RH9 on it as well.

Yeah, I had the same prob. I thought at first that windows infected my bios and rendered any Linux cd's unbootable

However,I found the info on the Hungry Minds site, install RH9 and love it. Linux really is better.

Well here it is for any who have followed this saga. The new machine is online and installation went almost flawlessy. RH 9 did not find my modem but when I entered it manually all was well. It also said may partion table was inconsistent(whatever it meant by that) but I see no problems. Here is the rundown: