Certain distros not booting?

[Frank DiPrete]

On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 10:09 -0400, Cole Tuininga wrote:
> Hi all - I have a little bit of an odd situation I was hoping somebody
> might be able to shed some light on.
> 
> Somebody has asked me to take a machine with a 300+GB hard drive, and
> install 5 or 6 different distributions of linux on it for them.  The
> idea is that they want to play with the different version for a while
> before picking one.
> 
> The hard drive is the master on IDE0, and the CD drive is the master on
> IDE1.
> 
> Here's the odd part.
> 
> Certain distributions' install CDs won't boot.  I can boot Ubuntu (both
> live and install CDs), I can boot Knoppix, but I cannot boot either
> Fedora Core 4 or CentOS 4.1.  When I put them in, the boot process just
> acts as though there isn't even a CD in the drive.  
> 
> I'm reasonably certain that both CDs are good - I used them just a
> couple days ago.  
> 
> It's not boot order in the BIOS - I have that set to use the CD drive
> first.
> 
> Anybody have any thoughts?  I'm more than happy to provide any required
> information that I didn't post here...
> 

I've run into this sort of thing before and used loadlin as a work
around. make a boot floppy (dos-ish) with the cdrom driver and mscdex,
then use a 2nd floppy with loadlin on it to load the install kernel from
the cdrom. Be sure to use loadlin version 1.6c as it supports larger
kernels.

ftp://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/pub/linux/loadlin-1.6/update-1.6c/

I've used this to install fedora on a machine with a non bootable scsi
cdrom drive. works like a charm.



-- 
Frank DiPrete <fdiprete at comcast.net>