Problems installing Red Hat 7.3 on Omnibook vt6200

[fario]

Hi all,

I'm having a big problem when installing Red Hat 7.3 on an Omnibook vt6200. The Red Hat installr complaints : "The partition table on device hda was unreadable...."; running linux in the rescue mode I have made the partitions with fdisk with no problem; but the installer keeps complaining about it. Do you know if there is something strange between RH7.3 and Omnibook vt6200 ?

Thank you very much for your help.
Regards.

[fario]

Hi all,

There's no need to answer this question as I have found it on itrc.

Well, I'm posting it if it is useful in the future.

To avoid this strange error (I think it occurs also with RH7.1 and Rh7.2) that is related to the chipset of the laptop do the next:

In the initial screen when booting don't press enter, type:

boot: expert text linux idebus=66

and you'll be able to enter the text mode installation. You'll be able to execute Disk Druid without problems.

Bye.

[George Overton]

Hi Fabio,

Thanks for posting the fix for loading RedHat on the HP Omnibook vt6200.
So far I have a vt6200 running Windows 2000 and hosting a RH Linux 7.2 guest OS using VMware 3.1.
Unfortunately I cannot get a similar vt6200 laptop to dual boot Windows 2000 and RH 7.2.
The Linux boot gives a kernel panic as follows:

Mounting root filesystem.
hda: status error: status=0x58 {DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest}
hda: drive not ready for command.
EXT-fs: Magic mismatch, very weird?
mount: error 32 mounting ext3.
.
.
Kernel panic: no init found.

Any ideas??

[fario]

Hi George,

I had the same problem; I'm running Win2000 and RH7.3 with no problems now.

Start linux from a boot diskette in this way:

boot: linux idebus=66

Well, you'll entry in linux.

Edit the /etc/grub.conf and add the parameter idebus=66 to this line:

kernel boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-3 ro root=/dev/hda? idebus=66

And you'll be able to dual boot your vt8200.

Tell me if you succeed.

bye

[fario]

It's all for the chipset that comes with the 8200vt.

It doens't recognize the hard disk if you don't specify this parameter to the kernel.

[fario]

OOOOpppsssss

I wanted to say Omnibook vt6200, not 8200 :)

[George Overton]

Hi Fario,

At last I have some time to try and fix this problem with the vt6200.
Using your last instructions I have now managed to get the HP Omnibook vt6200 to dual-boot either Windows 2000 or Linux RedHat 7.2. Unfortunately I cannot get X to work correctly whatever settings are entered. It looks like (once again) the hardware is not recognised properly.
According to /var/log/Xfree86.0.log the ATI Mobility Radeon card is probed successfully, but it fails to detect the panel size. It then says "Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration. Fatal server error: no screens found".

Any ideas?

[brimar_1]

I had the same problems with an "hp omnibook xe4500" and redhat 7.3.
I found the right answer in
http://www.net42.co.uk/linux-on-xe4500.shtml.