Redhat 8.0

[Ping898]

Hey, I am trying to install Redhat 8.0 (and yes has to be redhat 8.0) on a new Dell PC. The install goes fine but the machine will not boot. It gets stuck on whatever command follows finding the CD-Rom (don't know what command that is). I've tried playing with settings, installing with different set of discs, different machine with the same specs among other things. I am thinking maybe redhat 8 can't handle the dual CPU or doesn't like the SATA hard drive connection, but am not sure. Has anyone had any trouble with the install of older versions of Redhat on newer technology?

 

[bignick]

Does anything pop up on the screen at all when you try to boot?

 

[Andrew Green]

Could be any number of harware things Linux autodetects harware, any technology which is newer then your distribution might not show up.

Any reason why it has to be Redhat 8.0?

Obvious reccomendation would be give Fedora core 3 a try....

There will likely be a way to boot it so that you can skip autodetection, or do a yes/no for each step in the boot sequence.

 

[bignick]

There are still problems with Core 3...

It has some problems detecting disk geometry and when I installed it GRUB wasn't installed correctly...

So when I tried to reboot after install I got this lovely message "GRUB loading stage2" and nothing else...if that is your problem it's a pretty easy fix. Just use your install disk to boot up and enter the linux rescue mode and reinstall GRUB...

 

[Ping898]

Has to be redhat 8.0 cause it is what is in the specs of the systems we are testing and what was used during the development of the systems.

No error messages, just hangs in the boot sequence after it says it found ide1 (the cd-rom) and no error messages during install.

 

[Andrew Green]

If you can figure out what the step is that it hangs on you might be able to skip it...

 

[Ping898]

If you can figure out what the step is that it hangs on you might be able to skip it...

Yea, so far nothing I've tried has been able to determine what comes next, all I can tell is it happens right after it checks the cd-rom, which I determined by disabling the cd-rom in bios and the boot up went the same point and hung.
When I load the cd's to do a reinstall it runs through the checks so fast I can't see what comes next and I don't know how to slow that down.

 

[Fight with attitude]

How new is the hard drive?
How new is the BIOS?
What size is the hard drive?
Do you know the max size that the BIOS will read?
What brand is the hard drive?..certain OS's and hard drives don't get a long well together.

 

[OUMoose]

Just did a little poking around and it does look like SATA is supported in the 2.4 kernel. My question is, though, do you know if it's set by default, or do you need to enable it and recompile the kernel? Is there any reason why you couldn't put a standard IDE drive in the machine just for boot purposes to test the theory? Also, not sure if SMP is enabled by default, but in any case the system would only use one of the processors, so I don't think the problem is there.

 

[Ping898]

Computer is brand new, just pulled from the box, had win xp on it when it arrived and booted fine intially. It is just your standard dell.
Maxtor 60 gb hard drive, bios is as up to date as it can be.

 

[Fight with attitude]

Hmmm well then it couldn't be what I first thought.

Have you tried swiching around the primary and secondary drives? I.E. if the hard drive is primary swich it to secondary and see if it works.

Also try changing the RAM. My boss was telling me a story the other day about how he could run windows fine on one computer but when he tried linux it won't work. So he changed the RAM and it worked. It might of have something to do with the time loops in the RAM.

 

[Chronuss]

from what you've said, I'm guessing you've got a dual boot machine going on....have you tried Knoppix at all to see if that would allow you test what you need to? ...may sound stupid...but try disconnecting the floppy drive or any other drives like a burner or DVD player. from what you've said it sounds like it's detecting IDE0 and IDE1...what's the worst that could happen...it still not work? and if the motherboard has serial ATA, that prolly means there's only one IDE connector on it, and the CD-ROM is probably using that.

 

[Ping898]

Actually it isn't dual boot, it was a win 2k machine, but is no more :ultracool

We scavanged up some IDE hard drives and that appears to take care of the problem. Hopefully that is the only hardware issue and during testing more problems will not appear....

 

[Chronuss]

so it was the serial ATA that was the problem...that's interesting. why didn't you make a dual boot machine? with that 60GB, you coulda made a 4096MB partition for Win2k and would've had plenty of space for a Penguin partition.