F8 install failure again & again

[Felix Miata]

On 2007/12/18 22:59 (GMT-0600) Jeff Krebs apparently typed:

> I'll chime in.  Maybe these have already been suggested, but...

> - Try booting off a CD distro (Fedora Live, FeatherLinux, PuppyLinux, 
> etc.) or a floppy distro (tomsrtbt).  Make sure that the boot partition 
> is toggled as "bootable" (I use the linux fdisk, with the "a" option").

Did that with F8 KDE CD, proving it's not a hardware problem.

> I've run into issues with more than one drive installed, where each 
> drive had the first partition marked as bootable ("*"). F8 seemed to do 
> this on every drive it setup. I usually only have one drive set as 
> bootable; after install, F8 had all three of my drives set as bootable. 
> More on this in a sec...

> - Under the BIOS, the first submenu usually has basic device/drive info 
> (where you set the AUTO option, time, etc.).  The second submenu, 
> Advanced Options(?), has "First Boot Device", "Second Boot Device", 
> "Third Boot Device", or something similar.  Make sure those are looking 
> at the right thing.

> I think this is where that "bootable" thing falls into play.  I install 
> off a spare CDROM for initial boot, and have the DVD iso on the HD.  I 
> set the BIOS to boot, in order, CD, Fujitsu HD, Fujitsu HD (Same HD, and 
> my BIOS lists the drives by manufacturer). After install, when I 

I rarely install from CD or DVD. Most of my installs are started by Grub,
using copies of the installation kernel and initrd located on a local /boot
partition, and an HTTP source, usually mirrors.kernel.org. A couple of these
failed attempts were started from a burned boot.iso, without apparent
deviation from the failure pattern.

> disconnect the CDROM, I get a boot failure.  I have to go into the BIOS, 
> where it displays "network" where "CDROM" used to be.  I change that to 
> "Fujitsu" and things work fine after that.

> My BIOS seems to guess at anything it thinks is bootable. It also 
> changes things on its own if I mod my system.  Perhaps this could be 
> happening to you?

I have another system in which any type of hardware change results in the
BIOS randomly rearranging the boot device order settings, but that's not the
case here with a Dell BIOS on a system engineered 7 years ago.

> - You MAY need to change your drive settings under the BIOS from AUTO to 
> LARGE.  I spent 3 days smacking my head against a wall on this issue; 
> changing things to LARGE allowed smooth sailing. Socket A motherboard, 
> certainly not new, but I've had older K6 and PIII motherboards that were 
> more forgiving.

As indicated in
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2007-December/msg02320.html there
are 13 other operating systems installed and fully functional, and spread
across two PATA disks. None of them require deviations from normal BIOS
settings in order to boot, and none needed deviations from normal BIOS
settings in order to get installed.

> - Have you tried a different IDE cable?

Several, along with other motherboards, RAM sticks and video cards.

Yum eventually did what Anaconda couldn't. F8 is now running from /dev/hdc11
and /dev/sdc11.
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 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/