Fedora 8.0 Installation problems

[Todd Denniston]

Robert Cox wrote, On 05/15/2008 05:58 PM:
> Ric, Max and others,
>    

BTW, please don't top post.
>   I stumbled across another Forum today with a person who 
>    encountered the same problem as I did on the nearly the 
>    same specs as my system. 

Some of the folks on the list might be able to take better guesses, IF we knew 
what those specs were, i.e., post a smolt or lspci or tell us it is a Dell|HP 
Model 1500 (which we could lookup the specs for), on an AZUS5 mobo, with a 
Toshiba 1X DVD connected through USB.
BTW we are talking about F9 right?
>    The person replying to this person said that Fedora is 
>    trying to load from the wrong device. 

URL?
>    It sometimes thinks that you are loading from a hard 
>    disk instead of CD ROM even though it boots from the DVD. 

BIOS maker & version?
>    To save myself work and time and joining another forum. 
>    How to do you find the source directory from the installation 
>    menu to check to see what it is trying to install from? 

At the point you are in the install sequence, you are running out of a ramdisk 
that was loaded from the DVD in floppy emulation mode, the source directory is 
  still on the DVD and you can't apparently get to it, because once the BIOS 
got done using the DVD as a floppy Linux could not see the device on what ever 
bus [scsi|pata|sata|esata|usb|firewire|gpib|please pick one] that it happens 
to be on.

I had to deal with this on a RHEL 4 install because I was using a USB DVD and 
USB DVDs were not built into the install kernel, it would boot but not finish 
the kickstart install... AFAIK Fedora 9 does not suffer THAT problem.
>    I do not see an option on the installation screens to go 
>    into that directory. 

<Ctrl><Alt><F1><Enter>
<Ctrl><Alt><F2><Enter>
<Ctrl><Alt><F3><Enter>
<Ctrl><Alt><F4><Enter>
at least one of those is a terminal where you can execute commands, like lspci 
and cd.
and IIRC one is essentially syslog|dmesg which may give other clues to the 
problem.

>    Once again I appreciate any assistance.
>    
>   Thanks,
>   Rob
>   
> max bianco <maximilianbianco at gmail.com> wrote:
>   On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 11:50 PM, Ric Moore wrote:
>> On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 21:48 -0400, max wrote:
>>> Robert Cox wrote:
>>>> I need to reiterate that when I boot from my fedora DVD initially, it appears like it loads my drivers OK as soon as it boots. This usually takes 2-3 minutes. It then asks me for my languages. Then I chose the CD installation method. At this point it says that my device driver cannot be found, and gives me a number of different drivers to choose from including several different types of SCSI. I am just not sure which one I should use for the install. It will not let me go beyond this step. Any further suggestions would be appreciated.
>>>>
>>> Device driver for what device?, i seem to have missed that part
>>> somehow(scratches head), list the options it gives you , this may
>>> provide a better clue to which device driver you are talking
>>> about(presumably the harddrive?I hate assuming but i will if i have too
>>> :) You might also try just randomly picking one of the available
>>> choices, assuming you have good backups of everything, I don't think it
>>> would hose anything since if you pick the wrong one it shouldn't work at
>>> all, sometimes you gotta just stick your neck out....but keep good
>>> backups , just in case.
<SNIP>

-- 
Todd Denniston
Crane Division, Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC Crane)
Harnessing the Power of Technology for the Warfighter