Cannot see CD-ROM when installing RH 7.2 on Netserver LC

[Paul Mancillas]

I'm trying to install Red Hat 7.2 on an old HP Netserver LC 133. I boot from the install CD and it gets to the screen where it asks for the "Installation Method". My choices are "NFS image", "FTP" or "HTTP" but no "Local CD-ROM". It's like it does not see the (internal SCSI) CD-ROM drive at that point. I can boot from the RH 7.1 CD and it gives me the option of installing from the CD-ROM drive, but the 7.2 CD does not. Any help is very much appreciated.

Paul Mancillas

[Charles Slivkoff · Accepted solution]

Can you get to the other virtual consoles (CTRL+ALT+Fn)?

VC#2 might have a shell prompt that you can use to poke around in /proc, etc.

VC#3 & #4 may have other useful info as well.

Have you tried booting from floppy? You will need 2 floppies, one having "boot.img", the other drvblock.img for the SCSI drivers.

[Mark Fenton]

CPaul,

It sounds like Linux is dumping the driver for the scsi adapter after it boots. You'll probably have to follow a procedure like Chuck suggests to make sure it loads the scsi drivers in the kernel during setup.

good luck!
Mark

[Paul Mancillas]

Chuck & Mark,

Thanks for the suggestions. I fixed the problem. I had to create a "driver floppy disk" by copying a file called "oldcdroms" from the RH 7.2 Installation disk to a floppy disk. The Red Hat 7.2 Installation Guide gave me the solution. Then I had to boot up in "expert" mode at the "boot:" prompt so it would ask me to use the driver disk. Apparently the driver for the old Sony CD-ROM drive that I have is not in the install kernel by default. Once I did this then I could choose to install from the "Local CD-ROM".

Paul