Red Hat 9 installation on HP laptop

[Duncan Forbes]

I have a Pavilion ze5375us and am trying to install RH9 from the CD. The CD boots and runs through all the preliminary hardware checking, gets to the welcome screen, displays this message "loading ochi 1394 driver" and freezes. I've tried this with both the Red Hat boxed set and a two CD publisher's version with exactly the same result. What gives?

[Kjartan Maraas]

It's failing to initialize the firewire driver it seems. Can you disable firewire in the BIOS and try again?

[Caesar_3]

Hello!

You should disable your wireless card and
made the install after try to rebuild the
kernel or load the module for the wireless

Also look on this.
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xd1ff5dc05a7ad711abdc0090277a778c,00.html

Caesar

[Duncan Forbes]

Kjartan, I can't disable the firewire from the BIOS (no such option), so I tried to do so with Device Manager (Windows XP), but no joy.

Caesar, how do you disable the wireless card? I don't think you can do it in my BIOS, and I tried to disable all the stuff I could in Device Manager, and then reboot with the RH9 CD, also no joy. Of course, as soon as I boot into XP, the new hardware wizard reloads everything.

Thanks for trying! I appreciate it.

[Kjartan Maraas]

Found a link that seems to have a solution for you:

http://bizforums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/0,,0x9b0c5fe8b250d71190080090279cd0f9,00.html

Cheers
Kjartan

[Keith Willett]

Frustrating experience isn't it! :-) What I've learned so far:

Installation
- Boot while passing the nofirewire kernel option; the ohci1394 is a firewire driver.

Post Installation
- First boot:
1) Still pass the nofirewire kernel option. I'm using GRUB in a dual-boot with XP, so I needed to edit the Linux boot line in GRUB.
2) The system will still hang during boot when searching for new hardware. Use the Interactive boot option and reply "N" to the kudzu service.

You should enter Linux at this point, I chose the GNOME GUI. Now, since no hardware was searched, the CD ROM won't work. The obvious next step is to load the documentation from the CD... hmmm... kinda tough to look up how to use the CD when the documentation on how to use the CD drive is on a CD ROM. :-) Use the command: mount -t iso9660 /dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrom. You now have the CD available on mount point: /mnt/cdrom. Place the documentation CD in the drive and execute the command: /mnt/cdrom/autorun. This will load the documentation.

You will also run into problems while shutting down. The shutdown process will hang on the PCMCIA service. To bypass the boot problem with kudzu and shutdown problem with pcmcia, use the ntsysv command and turn off kudzu and pcmcia.

To have the "nofirewe" option auto run during boot, vi /boot/grub/grub.conf and add "nofirewire" to the linux boot line.

Now, do all these solve the problem: NO! :-) They just bypass the symptoms. Which at least gets you a booting Linux system. This is where I am now with many more things to work out. Hope this helps!