"RAMDISK: couldn't find a valid ramdisk image starting at 0" and FC4 installation

[Kostas Sfakiotakis]

Greetings Mark,

Mark Ryden wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I tried to install Fedora Core 4 on 64 it PC (Intel Xeon CPU) with a SATA disk.

:)) Well i like tradition . Any good old IDE Disks available ?
> I got the error, in a very early stage of installation:

I guess you mean  that you didn't really succeeded installing Fedora 
Core 4 .


> 
> "RAMDISK: couldn't find a valid ramdisk image starting at 0"  


RAMDISK is a portion of your systems RAM used as a temporary place for
initrd . Now initrd is where you are supposed to PRELOAD the module 
responsible
for accessing your SATA HDD .

> I verified my installation disks were OK (by running "sha1sum").

OK.  That can be expected .

> Then I googled for a solution for a similiar problem, and it took
> me a lot of time without a solution. After almost giving up
> and starting to think of a different distro, I reached the
> following thread in some Israeli linux mailing list:
> http://mirror.hamakor.org.il/archives/linux-il/06-2005/15959.html
> 
> First I did not believe what I saw. Then I tried it (first enetring
> gibrish and afterwards "enter" ) and ... it worked !!
> 
> My question is :
> 1) From where is this "RAMDISK: couldn't find a valid ramdisk image
> starting at 0"  error ? 



What does it mean ?

Well it rather failled to initialize the RAMDISK .


  Is it has to do with that I have a SATA disk?

Probably but not certainly .  Although i can only speculate on what's 
going on , here it goes .

You are trying to install Fedora Core 4 on a SATA Drive alone without 
using any IDE Drives but
at the very begining of the installation you don't  tell linux that it 
has to PRELOAD the driver for
your SATA Drive . I actually mean that probably Fedora Core 4 doesn't 
support by it's one your
SATA Drive so it has to be assisted with the SATA Disk Driver .

Possibly if  you retry to install  Fedora Core 4 in TEXT mode with

linux text preload=SATA_Disk_Driver you will succeed .


Kind Regards,
   Kostas


> 2) Is there no other solution ? (It seems not so much a proper way)
> 
> Regards,
> MR
> 
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