Fedora Core 2 boot problems

[Paul Howarth]

Darren Coleman wrote:
> Yes, the FC2 CD works in rescue mode - I can mount /mnt/sysimage as if it
> were my working system.  I haven't tried installing a standard kernel whilst
> in rescue mode, but I can't honestly see how it will help since a standard
> kernel install of 2.6.8.1 (latest on kernel.org) fails on my RH9 install
> with the same symptoms.
> 
> My only guess is that either something inherent in 2.6.x is incompatible
> with my hardware, or I am enabling something (or not as the case may be) in
> the kernel which specifically does not work with my hardware.  I find the
> latter unlikely given I have no specialist hardware in the machine, I have
> installed 2.6.x countless times before, etc.

Having read through the previous items in this thread, I was inclined to agree 
with you that there was a compatibility issue between your hardware and the 
2.6.x kernel, since you never seem to get past a very early stage of the 
kernel boot process. However, you've just said that the FC2 CD works in rescue 
mode, and that's 2.6.5-1.358 isn't it?

If you currently have RH9 installed with grub as the bootloader, you could do 
a quick test to see if the kernel and initrd from the FC2 CD will load from 
grub. You can extract these from the FC2 CD by copying the boot.iso image from 
the images/ directory of the CD and loopback mounting it:

mkdir /mnt/boot.iso
mount -r -o loop boot.iso /mnt/boot.iso
cp -p /mnt/boot.iso/isolinux/vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz-fc2
cp -p /mnt/boot.iso/isolinux/initrd.img /boot/initrd-fc2.img

Then add an entry to boot that kernel and initrd pair to your grub.conf. 
You'll need to append "ramdisk_size=8192" to the kernel line due to the large 
initrd. If that boots (it'll boot into the FC2 installer), you might then try 
installing the FC2 i586 kernel RPM (same kernel, different initrd) and see how 
that goes.

Paul.