[RULE] Red Hat 8 Publishers edition...boot >>NOT

[Michael Fratoni]

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On Wednesday 25 June 2003 07:44 pm, Harold Tuchel wrote:
> Pionex 486 80 meg hardrive Boot device c or a: cdrom not allowed
> toboot..I Installed it after system purchase Objective dual boot linux
> 8.0 and win 3.11

This isn't going to work, given the available drive space, but read on 
anyway. ;)

> This is all to complicated....got a publishers CD R/H version 8.0 two
> cdset....Of course the CD drive is non-boot...so I went about making a
> boot disk from Ver 8.0
>
> boot.img from redhat.
>
> That crashed...it hangs 

The Red hat installer will not work on this machine. Older versions will 
probably work, but anything more recent than 7.3 will surely fail.

>Using slinky or miniconda I have been able to
>
> partition the disk to
>
> ha1,ha2,ha3. Slinky makes it thru to the hardware probes and recognizes
>
> the three
>
> partitions and fd0, and hde which I am assuming is cdrom drive e. I
> cannot
>
> however access
>
> drive e and also do not have such options to choose from in slinky.
> Have
>
> tried at boot:linux hde=cdrom
[...]

The CDROM should be either hdb or hdc most likely. This assumes the drive 
is IDE and not SCSI.

If it is set up as a slave on the same cable as the hard drive, it will be 
hdb, if it is the master on the second ide controller, it should be hdc.

Slinky _should_ be able to auto detect the cdrom, assuming it is 
recognized at boot time. During slinky's boot, you should see something 
like (from one of my machines):
hdc: ATAPI CD-ROM DRIVE 40X MAXIMUM, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

Can you use the slinky disk to boot and get to a command prompt? If so, 
try:
less /proc/sys/dev/cdrom/info
If you could tell me if that file exists, and send me the contents of the 
file if it does exist, it would be helpful.

Failing that, perhaps the contents of 
less /proc/ide/ide0/hdb/model
less /proc/ide/ide1/hdc/model
less /proc/ide/ide1/hdd/model

One of the above _should_ be the CDROM, and the file should contain 
something like:
[mfratoni at paradox slinky]$ less /proc/ide/ide1/hdd/model

ATAPI-CD ROM-DRIVE-56MAX

> The drive is to small to download Iso's I think...and I probably
> wouldn't
>
> know what to do with
>
> them when I got them.
>
> Am I over-reaching to try to revive this Pionex 486 with 3rd party
> cdrom
>
> and no cdrom boot
>
> bios??? Will it be worth the aggravation?? P.S. without being insulting
>
> or wanting to start a flame,
>
> is this the norm for Red Hat or is linux still for the advanced
> user????

Using the stock installer on more modern equipment, Red Hat is pretty easy 
for anyone to install. Using Slinky....
Well, it can be a bit more complicated. It still shouldn't be hard, given 
reasonable hardware. However, in your case, even the most minimal install 
won't fit on a 80 Meg drive. The basic install is going to need more like 
200 Meg. What will happen if you try? The installer should run, begin 
installing packages, and then fail while installing glibc, the kernel, 
and a few other larger packages. This isn't impossible to overcome, I've 
done it. It's a bit complicated, and does require some Linux know how. I 
managed to get a functional system installed on an old i386 laptop with 
an 80 Meg drive. However, the drive is about 90% full, and the system is 
pretty slow. If you can find a larger used drive somewhere, I'd be happy 
to help you get the installer working. I have managed to salvage several 
400 - 600 Meg disks from discarded machines. I've also seen a few offered 
for sale for next to nothing at computer shows.

- -- 
- -Michael

pgp key:  http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/gpgkey.txt
Red Hat Linux 7.{2,3}|8.0 in 8M of RAM: http://www.rule-project.org/
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