The redhat pinstripe installation can fail without good cause during the installation process. Boot the CD and choose either the install or upgrade install path, they both fail. During the installation the script will attempt to read the partition table in all of the hard drives in the system. I have one hard drive connected via a Promise IDE controller card which currently uses the PDC20262 device for access. There is nothing on this hard drive that I need to do a redhat install, and I would be happy to patch the kernel after doing a redhat pinstripe install to other hard drives, in order to support this controller. It is not supported by default in the kernel redhat pinstripe is booting. However, the redhat install tries to mount file systems on this drive and discovers they are not available. This causes it to fail and does not allow the installation to continue. The install process should detect that this is a non-critical failure, or ask the user if the failure is critical or non-critical. The installation could then be continued without problem.
What kind of messages are given when the install fails?
Error message doing upgrade is ``Error mounting hde1: Block device required'' Following that is: ``One or more of the filesystems listed in /etc/fstab cannot be mounted. Please fix this problem and try to upgrade again.''
Just remove the drive from the /etc/fstab file and proceed with the upgrade.