need help with install problem

[Robert]

Rich Coco wrote:
> I am trying to install fedora-fc2 on a pc.
> i have successfully downloaded and burnt to cd the four
> iso images. i have even burnt the boot.iso and copied the
> diskboot.image file onto a zip-100 disk (using dd).
> (both of these camee from ISO disk #1)
> I would have guessed i was all set, but noooo....
> 
> the PC on which i am a attempting to install Fedora will not
> recognize either the boot.iso or the zip (a usb device) as bootable.
> 
> I am certain i have copied the images onto their respective media
> properly. why? because I can see their contents (from another RH 9.0 PC):
> 
> The diskboot.image file dd-ed onto the zip as a bunch of .msg, .bin, .sys,
> .cfg files plus a vmlinuz.
> 
> The boot.iso CD consists of a TRANS.tbl file and a directory called 
> isolinux
> that contains the same files as the (diskboot.image) zip disk)
> 
> It almost makes sense to me that the boot.iso is not a bootable
> media becuse i would not have expected the boot files to be in a
> directory (isolinux) but at the top level! I almost wonder if the boot.iso
> file that came with the first Fedora disk was incorrectly put together.
> 
> i do not know why the pc will not boot off the zip disk.
> the bios has support for it, since it lets me choose 'zip100' from
> a menu of devices to check at boot time. my guess is that it's because
> it's a USB device and not an IDE device? anyway, all my USB-related
> bios setting are enabled, so i do not think it's a setting. maybe my bios
> simply does not support booting from USB devices, period.
> 
> so...what do i do? any ideas?
> 
> eg, is there a way for me to split the diskboot.image across multiple
> floppies and boot up like that?
> 
> (for the record, the target PC is currently running RH 9.0 as well.
> so i tried copying the 4 Fedora ISO files to a 2nd hard drive on that
> PC and, using my trusty RH 9.0 floppy boot.img, i booted up the PC and
> tried to perform an install from the local hard drive. however, the RH
> install stuff was too smart for that to work since it would not recognize
> the Fedora ISOs. Not surprising i suppose and maybe not even smart on my 
> part,
> but i was/am getting desperate.)
> 
> thanks,
> 
> - rich
> 

Whoa!  Take a deep breath.

Surely, if that target machine has a BIOS option for booting from a zip 
drive and even groks the existence of USB, there's an option for booting 
from CDROM.  *IF* you really have burned your CDs correctly, the 1st CD 
will be bootable. If you mount that 1st CD on your RH9.0 machine, you 
should see this:
[rj at mavis rj]$ ls -la /mnt/cdrom1
total 191
drwxr-xr-x    5 root     root         4096 May 13 04:27 .
drwxr-xr-x   23 root     root         4096 Jul 18 13:30 ..
-rwxr-xr-x    2 root     root          248 May 13 04:02 autorun
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           78 May 13 04:27 .discinfo
-rw-r--r--    9 root     root         5611 May 13 04:02 eula.txt
drwxr-xr-x    4 root     root         2048 May 13 04:27 Fedora
-rw-r--r--    9 root     root        18385 May 13 04:02 GPL
drwxr-xr-x    3 root     root         2048 May 13 04:27 images
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         2048 May 13 04:27 isolinux
-rw-r--r--    2 root     root        12667 May 13 04:02 README-Accessibility
-rw-r--r--    2 root     root         5299 May 13 04:02 README-en
-rw-r--r--    2 root     root         7465 May 13 04:02 README-en.html
-rw-r--r--    2 root     root        47589 May 13 04:02 RELEASE-NOTES-en
-rw-r--r--    2 root     root        67109 May 13 04:02 
RELEASE-NOTES-en.html
-rw-r--r--    9 root     root         1910 May 13 04:02 RPM-GPG-KEY
-rw-r--r--    9 root     root         1706 May 13 04:02 RPM-GPG-KEY-beta
-rw-r--r--    9 root     root         1519 May 13 04:02 RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora
-rw-r--r--    9 root     root         1105 May 13 04:02 
RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-rawhide
-rw-r--r--    9 root     root         1076 May 13 04:02 
RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-test
-rw-r--r--    9 root     root         1232 May 13 04:02 RPM-GPG-KEY-rawhide
-r--r--r--    1 root     root         4056 May 13 04:39 TRANS.TBL
[rj at mavis rj]$

(w/o the line wrapping :-[.)

Anything else is wrong and you'll need to burn a new set of CDs, burning 
the .iso as an IMAGE rather than as a FILE.

Good luck!

-- 
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