3RD TRY: Re: Can't boot from Core 2 CD (HELP!) (fwd)

[Timothy Murphy]

Steven W. Orr wrote:

> Does anyone have any idea how I can debug this problem? I can boot from
> other CDs, but FC2 just stops dead. Any ideas?
...
> =>I rebooted by machine with Disk1 of Core2 in the CDROM. The system finds
> the =>cd and gives me the LILO splash screen. I tried hitting return for
> the =>graphical boot but it just hangs. I also tried "linus text" and that
> also =>hangs.
> =>
> =>My system is a scsi aic7xxx controller with 3 scsi disks, 1 ide drive. I
> have =>2 athlon 1600s.

I have a SCSI only machine and the last Redhat/Fedora CD to boot 
was Redhat-8.0 .
I've upgraded since then, and always kept a kernel which works to boot from.

If I wanted to install cleanly, I would do it from hard disk -
transferring the ISO images to hard disk,
copying the files in isolinux (on the first CD) to /boot/fedora ,
and making a grub entry to boot from this.
I think this has been described on this list several times.
It does assume you have a working Linux system on the machine.

If I didn't have such a system, I would probably use Knoppix -
this is much better than Fedora at booting on unusual machines.
In fact Fedora is very bad at this -
it would be better if the anaconda people spent more time and energy on this
rather than adding largely useless bells and whistles.
I'd use Knoppix to partition the disk (if necessary)
to transfer the ISOs to the hard disk,
transfer the isolinux directory and install grub as above.

I once installed SuSE, and then "upgraded" to Fedora in this way.
But Knoppix is easier.

Finally, you could look at the "Smart Boot Manager"
<http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/document.html>
though I have never tried this.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland