Can't install FC4 on a ABS Mayhem F-15 A40 (Turion 64 MT-32) laptop

[Zoltan Boszormenyi]

Hi,

Vladimir G. Ivanovic írta:
> Hi,
> 
> I can't get either FC4-i386 or FC4-x86_64 to install on my ABS Mayhem
> F-15 A40 Turion 64 (MT-32) laptop. I get
> 
>    VFS: Cannot open root device "NULL"or unknown block(3,2)
>    Please append a correct "root=" boot option.
> 
> not far into the boot process.
> 
> Usually this kind of error occurs when the correct disk controller
> driver (IDE, SCSI, etc.) for the boot device is not installed. Here
> the boot device would be the CDROM drive which is an IDE device.
> 
> I know that the CDROM is found because I get a bunch of boot messages
> listing what devices are found, and hdc is there (and the boot
> sequence does at least start and continue for a little bit, so stuff
> is coming off the CDROM).
> 
> Neither the FC4-i386 nor the FC4-X86_64 rescue disks work. They
> exhibit the same behavior as above. The FC3-i386 rescue disk and
> CentOS 4.2 (x86-64) both boot a bit more than the FC4 installs, but
> then pretty quickly the screen goes black and nothing happens.
> 
> Gnoppix 0.8 (i386) and Knoppix 3.8 (i386) both boot and run fine.
> 
> FreeBSD 6.0-RC1 (amd64) boots and goes into the install process.
> 
> And of course, the Windoze XP Home Edition that came with the laptop
> works just fine.
> 
> Is there some boot command line voodoo I can use to get the FC4-x86_64
> (or even the FC4-i386) version to boot properly? Is there anything
> else I should do or not do to get the x86_64 install to work?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> --- Vladimir
> 

I experienced the exact same problem on a P4 Celeron machine
with an AsRock P4VM800 motherboard, so it's not a generic AMD64
problem. I was able to workaround the problem by putting the hardisk
into another machine and install FC4 there but I didn't let "firstboot"
run. Putting back the hdd into the original machine and powering it
up re-made the install-time configuration, I had nothing to tweak.

This problem was seen with the original FC4 DVD and another, with
refreshed erratas that I created with help found in:

http://fedoranews.org/contributors/gene_czarcinski/update_distro/

I guessed it's a limitation of the above mainboard's BIOS
as it doesn't like the following mkisofs options:

mkisofs -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
    -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat ...

I installed many systems with several mainboards off those
DVDs easily, though...

Best regards,
Zoltán Böszörményi