Hard drive installation II

[Alessandro_22]

It seems that in order to do an hard drive installation of Red Hat 8.0 one needs the CD's ISO images, not the rpm's.
I obtained ISO's through Nero burning rom, I renamed them after ftp's files

psyche-i386-disc*.iso

but it doesn't work. Could be because I'm using three (the one you need during installations) out of five CD images? Could be because I should not just copy them? Are there any expert with this kind of stuff? Thank you in advance,

Alessandro

[Jerome Henry · Accepted solution]

Hi Alessandro,

You need rh iso if you burn a cd rom that is to be bootable. Burning a cd naming files .iso won't make it bootable.

You DO can install rh with rpm files, what you need is something to boot on, say a floppy disk, on which you have a .img file that will boot a basic OS in your ram, and then access to a media in which rpm files can be found. The oinly difficulty is that this media structure (directories) must be what your boot floppy will expect, so you have to respect ftp site structure on that.

2 links : redhat installation site, which explains all that in details :
http://www.europe.redhat.com/documentation/rhl8.0/rhl-ig-x86-en-8.0/

Then redhat download site, where you can get .sio files, download then and with nero select file /burn image, selecting these iso files.
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/8.0/en/iso/i386

You can replace '8' by '9' to get the same on rh9, the latest...
As for CDs, the 3 first CDs are the OS, the 2 last are source and docs, which you don't need for normal install...

J

[Claudio Cilloni]

The first three CDs are enough to fully install RH8 (by the way: if you can, use RH9. It is a big bug-fix for RH8. RH9 works a lot better). I never made a HD installation. Are you following some instructions to do that? Could you give more details about how the installation process don't work?

Ciao
Claudio

[Alessandro_22]

Thanks for your comments mates.
That's the (unsuccessful) procedure I'm using: I did a boot floppy using utilities of RedHat CDs, as suggested in the installation manual.
Under windows, I'm burning the images of the three installation CDs through Nero burning rom, just saving them in my fat32 partition (this is ok, because the installation program can read fat partitions and this should be the standard way to do that).
After booting with my floppy, I try to point to the directory containing ISO images, but nothing to do, it doesn't like them.
That's why I think that they need some kind of treatment (for example, to obatin the boot floppy I need to copy an image file in a floppy with a program called raw-something, I guess I should do the same with the ISO images of the CDs and that's what I'm going to try...)
Thank you again, I'll higly appreciate further comments on this, ciao

Alessandro

[Umapathy S]

Alessandro,
I am missing something here. May be I am not completely understanding your problem.

I have successfully done local,nfs and ftp remote installations in RH9.0.
If you are trying to install from local cdrom, you need to have iso images burned in iso format as Jerome has explained.
For harddrive installations, you need a boot disk. Check and give the correct partition before proceeding
If its not working, then try some remote installations via NFS.

Please let us know the outcome
HTH,
Umapathy

[Alessandro_22]

Hi! I'm trying an HD installation. Now, with RedHat 8.0/9.0 you need ISOs images in an hard disk to do that, at least that's what reported in the manual. If I raw write boot.img in a floppy, this should start the installation program -indeed- and mount them -indeed not :)-
I'm using Nero 5.5 to produce the ISOs (this under windows, where I can read my cds through external USB), and that's the point: the result is not the required ISO9660 files, but something else, and the installation doesn't like this.
I would like to have your opinion about that: suppose I download the right RH 9.0 ISOs with a different machine, I burn them as simple files in some CDs and I copy them in the fat32 partition under windoze. Will this procedure damage the ISOs? Well, I'm going to try. Even if I loose a couple of CD's, it's not that tragedy.
Thanks to all of you for your time/help, that's a great forum! Best

Alessandro

[Manuel Wolfshant]

Alessandro, the 3 iso files ARE THE IMAGES, not simple FILES that have to be written on a cd. With nero you should choose 'create CD from image' (and choose in turn each .iso as source image) not 'new project -> create cd-> add file (at which point you would add each iso in turn to a project)'
I repeat: you DO NOT NEED to create new images which would contain the .iso. Each psyche*.iso file IS an iso9660 image. Using WinISO for instance you can actually peek at the content of each .iso

In order to have a successfull installation, I strongly suggest you to read the "RedHat Linux Installation Guide". It is available both on the psyche-docs CD (use either shrike-docs-US.iso which contains only the English version or shrike-docs-EMEA.iso which also includes the docs translated in some European and Middles East languages) and online at http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/install-guide/

[Umapathy S]

Alessandro,
I will also suggest you to do the media check as in the installation guide before installing. This makes sure the iso files are not corrupted.
And please donot burn them as simple files. They are not meant to be done like that. The iso images itself have the CD layout which makes it bootable. It is not written as a single large file.
I dont have experience on Nero. So I couldnt comment on that.

HTH,
Umapathy

[Steven E. Protter]

It might be simply to do this, though its a waste of cd's.

On a windows box:

Burn the firs ISO to a rw cd

Then copy it to the installation point under directory /disc1

Same thing for the next two.

Then for certain, you will be able to install Red Hat.

As var as version choices, RH8 is a stepchild to me, originally intended as a major bug fix to 7.3. I use 7.3 because its stable or 9, because I like pain.

SEP

[Jerome Henry]

Hi Alessandro,

sumarizing mates' tips :
- use boot.img to make boot diskette, assuming that the hard drive that contains the rpms to install is local on your machine. If it's remote, then use network images.
- on using nero, use the make cd from image, don't check 'make an image' on next screen, but burn cd.
- On your fat partition, make a folder, call it whatever you want. Copy to it each CD you made before, be sure to copy everything (no hidden file that you wouldn't select, so be sure to uncheck 'hide system files' on your explorer options), all in the same directory, no sub-directories.
- On booting to install choose install from hard drive, not from CD, you should be able at least to see your drive partitions. Remember the way Linux sees your HD partitions : hda1 means first partition on first ide hard disk. 'C:' or stuff like that are of no sense on Linux. So, say if your system has 3 partitions on 2 IDE hard disks, windoz will call them C (1-1), D (1-2) E (1-3) F (2-1) G (2-2) and H (2-3), assuming it names it in order, which is not always the case (first number being disk number, second number being partition number on that disk). Linux will call them hda1, hda2, hda3, hdb1, hdb2, hdb3. Ok ? All your drives are seen as 'devices', so it should be seen as /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, and so on... If you can see that list on your boot menu, then the hardest is done, your system sees the partitions.
If, on your windows partition, you created a directory to hold the files that is called C:\linux\install, then you should select as seesn before /dev/hda1 (for C:), and in the directory holding image section, /linux/install. Beware, use '/', not '\', don't mention C:, don't use space in directory name or special caracters, use short directory names, less than 8 characters is a good idea (OK, mates, I know, we can use all those, but it implies to know how to manage the escape on those characters, let's do it easy !).
If, at that point, the system hangs, then the way you type is is wrong ! Tell us where you installed, we'll check it with you.

Sorry to be so long... :]]

J