Description of problem: On my Sony SR11K laptop with pcmcia cdrom drive, installs are always painful. Only redhat 7.x worked properly. Once you boot from cdrom, you must specify ide1=0x180,0x386 for the cdrom to keep working. This creates an hdc device. Stuff boots on until it loads the yenta_socket, when it finds another ide device. this becomes hde, From this point on, the cdrom logs ide timeout errors and fails. note that I cannot disable the idex= line because then it won't find the cdrom and won't load the initrd, modules and pcmcia tools. But I also cannot disable pcmcia detection from Anaconda (AFAIK). I can also not disable pcmcia in the very limited award bios that Sony ships. I tried all combinations i could think of as specified in the linux kernel documention's ide.txt (eg idex=noprobe, hdc=noprobe, and even things like hdc=scsi or hdc=0x0,0x0) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Find Sony SR11K with cdrom 2. Insert FC 3 test 1 3. wait Actual results: ide timeouts Expected results: perfectly smooth installation :) Additional info:
You also need to add pci=off if I remember correctly.
Jeremy: I love you :) That fixed the problem indeed.