rh9 install failures under vmware

[Bob McClure Jr]

Please beat your MS mailer about the head and shoulders until it wraps
lines every 72 chars or so.  I'll reformat this.

On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 11:52:43AM -0600, Sorens, Michael wrote:

> (1) Attempting to install under VMware on WindowsXP, I got just a
> few steps into the installation and was asked for mouse type. I
> selected USB wheel mouse, which I have, clicked Next, and then my
> mouse did not work. I tried several other mouse types and could
> never get the mouse back.  (During initialization, the installer
> seems to think I have a PS/2 wheel mouse, but that choice also
> fails.) My workaround was to simply use keyboard navigation to
> attempt to complete the install, so this is less important than item
> (2), but any thoughts on what is happening here...?

I have no experience with VMware.  I'll let others weigh in here.

> (2) I downloaded shrike-i386-disc1.iso, shrike-i386-disc2.iso, and
> shrike-i386-disc3.iso, ran an MD5 checker and confirmed they were
> complete,
>  loaded each onto a CD, and began the install (still under
> VMware). Everything went fine for 70% of the installation, until it
> got stuck on xpdf-2.01-8 on disk 2. The installer complained that
> the package could not be opened, and is probably due to a bad CD. So
> I burned a second CD--same problem! I repeated this situation using
> both the graphic install and the text install--same problem. So
> either I need to know how to cure this problem, or what to specify
> in the initial list of packages to install so it will not try to
> load this particular package.
> 
> (VMware, for those unfamiliar, is a tool that lets you build virtual
> machines on top of your physical machines; an alternative to
> partitions, in a way)
> 
> Thanks!
> ~~Michael Sorens

I don't know if VMware is the culprit here, but the RH installer is
known to be fragile about ext3 filesystems.  Try installing to ext2
filesystems and then convert to ext3 after the install.

Sometimes DMA is not very kosher and you need to boot the install with

  linux ide=nodma

There is more information here:

http://www.rhil.net/docs/faq.html#install_dies

and here

http://www.rhil.net/docs/ext2-to-ext3.html

Cheers,
-- 
Bob McClure, Jr.             Bobcat Open Systems, Inc.
robertmcclure at earthlink.net  http://www.bobcatos.com
Spring - God's greeting card.