by Symptom: Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 doesn't recognize my CD-ROM drive during
installation.
Information: I have an early NEC 3x SCSI CD-ROM drive. In normal DOS
booting, even my NCR53c810 SCSI controller doesn't recognize the
CD-ROM during SCSI BIOS polling. Only after I run the DOS driver,
MSCDEX.EXE, does the CD-ROM get recognized.
Install Scenario: Single floppy and CD-ROM installation. As per the
readme file on CD-ROM, I didn't use the three floppy installation. My
boot image was boot0036.img, SCSI NCR53x810, No ethernet, CD-ROM SCSI.
Problem: When I boot from floppy, hit enter once at the boot: prompt
to initialize hardware, I get prompted to insert the ramdisk1.img and
ramdisk2.img floppies. So I tried the three floppy install and got
to the partitioning section, neither fdisk or cfdisk found any drives.
When I did a media search, the RedHat CD-ROM could not be found.
Questions:
1) Is there a work-around to get RedHat installed from the CD-ROM?
2) Or do I have to copy the entire CD-ROM(s) to a harddrive?
3) It is not very clear in the install manual how to partition Linux.
Currently, I have 2 harddrives, one 540meg for DOS/Windows which is C:
drive; and one 2.1gig with a 2.1gig physical DOS partition but with a
1gig D: drive logical partition reserved for Linux and a 1gig E: drive
logical partition for DOS. My question is; will Linux do it's own
partitioning of logical drive D: partition? In other words, are Linux
partitions built on top of existing DOS partitions? Or will Linux
destroy the other logical drive partition for DOS (drive E:) as well?
4) I have a OPTI-ISA/VLB/PCI MB with a NCR53c810 PCI SCSI controller.
I read a FAQ that said this MB was nothing but trouble. Has anyone
got Linux installed on this MB successfully yet?
-gary