Attempting to update a complex system to Fedora 1 from RH 9.0 current

[Harry Moyes]

All
Attempting to update a complex system to Fedora 1 from RH 9.0 current

Two problems

1) probable bios issue with CD-Rom boot
2) system hangs after reading the IDE drives

See URL's for file details

I can probably force the upgrade by moving the disk to other hardware
for the initial upgrade, but before doing that I wondered if people have
suggestions to fix it in place, and if there is interest in resolving
the issue.


System details
**************

System is dual Athlon 2400's in a Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW-P motherboard.

Additional PCI IDE interface card. (six IDE interfaces total)
Additional RTL Ethernet card
Additional Soundblaster SB Live
ATI Radion 9200 AGP card

Two IDE h/d's 
CD Burner
CD-Rom drive
DVD-rom drive

Runs reliably with RH9.0 patched up to date.
(but if I recall I had to move the hard drive to another box
for the original install of RH8.0 and to do the initial upgrade to 9.0)

dmesg output is here : www.shoka.free-online.co.uk/dmesg.txt
lspvi output is here : www.shoka.free-online.co.uk/lspci.txt


Problem 1, probably bios issue, will not boot from CD.
******************************************************

Hangs before Grub splash screen.
Bios reports bootable CD in drive, is set to boot from PC, but hangs
if a bootable CD is present (in the drive the BIOS detects as the CD).
Keyboard is active, ctrl-alt-del will reset the system 

Also fails with SuperRescue2.1.2 and KnoppixV3.3 as well, so only
mentioned to explain the floopy based boot.

If I load the CD after Grub screen is reached on a floppy based boot,
the floppy boot continues normally. 


Problem 2 is a Fedora issue (I think)
*************************************
Similar issues dogged me with the initial install
of RH8.0 and the upgrade of this box to 9.0

The installers Grub splash screen loads normally, but the system hangs
hard after IDE drive 1 is initialised.

See photo of screen here: www.shoka.free-online.co.uk/FedoraInstall.jpg
Big. Sorry for the crap photography.

Locks after IDE drive 0 if I pull the second drive.
There is a third bay in this system, if I load this
with a disk, the boot correctly identifies the model of h/d, but does
not report IDE 2.

Power cycle or reset required to recover, the keyboard is dead.
I've left it tens of minutes to see if its doing some probe that
will eventually return, and it's never continued.

I've tried text and graphics installs with all variations of ide=nodma I
can come up with without changing anything.

Suggestions I can try or additional information I can supply?

Regards

Harry Moyes