I am trying to install RedHat 7 on a Toshiba 3480CT laptop. This has a 12GB IDE disk as /dev/hda1. It has no internal CD but I have a PCMCIA ATAPI CD drive, from which it can boot. It has no internal floppy, but it does have an external USB floppy, with BIOS emulation of a regular floppy which allows it to boot. Using Windows 2K, I copied the contents of the RH7 CD to the directory c:\tmp\redhat on the FAT32 file system on c. Each route I have tried to install seems blocked: 1) Boot & install from CD. I boot the system "expert" and get to the "Installation Method" dialog. I chose "Local CDROM" and get the "CDROM type" dialog with choices "SCSI" or "Other CDROM". Choosing "other" asks for a driver disk. Even if I had one it would be a floppy, and Ctrl-Alt-F4 screen shows that although it loaded usb & usb-uhci, and found a device on the USB bus (the floppy is the only device) the kernel doesn't recognize it. 2) Boot from PCMCIA floppy, install from CD. I boot the system "expert" and get the "PC Card" box - at this point the CD spins up. The Ctrl-Alt-F4 screen shows that cardmgr came up, recognized an ATA/IDE Fixed Disk in socket 0, and executed modprobe ide_cs.o. hdc was assigned to the ATAPI CDROM drive and there is a message "Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision 3.10". Then ide_cs says hdc: Vcc = 5.0, Vpp = 12.0. Then cardmgr says "fopen(stabfile) failed: %m" and exits. Going back to the install, I say "no" to the "Devices" question about whether I have a driver disk (because even if I did the floppy drive is USB). Then I get to the "Installation Method" dialog and only have "Hard drive" as a choice - the system fails to realize it has an ATAPI CD via the PCMCIA slot. [NB - if I boot "linux rescue" and tell it the RPMs and stuff are on the hard disk, I can use the rescue system to mount and access the PCMCIA CD]. 3) Boot from PCMCIA floppy or CD, install from hard disk. I boot the system "expert" and say "no" each time it asks for a driver disk. I choose "Hard disk" from the "Installation Method" dialog and "Custom System" from the "Installation Type" dialog. I use Disk Druid to ask for a partitionless install, with 2000 MB for the root and 128MB for swap. I choose generic 2-button mouse with 3-button emulation and set the time zone. I do the user setup and choose a set of package groups totalling 785MB. I choose "S3 Savage (generic)" because the 3480CT has an 8MB S3 Savage/IX. After a while, an "Exception Occurred" dialog appears. The problem is in trying to open /mnt/loophost/redhat.img for the very good reason that it doesn't exist (/mnt/loophost/rh-swap.img does exist and appears to be the requested size).
Assigning to a developer.
#3 is the only option for you in 7.0 (the next release will work better); however, could you send the contents of that traceback?
Here's the traceback: 438 /usr/bin/anaconda.real intf.run(todo, test = test) 1030 /var/tmp/anaconda-7.0.1//usr/lib/anaconda/text.py in run 507 /var/tmp/anaconda-7.0.1//usr/lib/anaconda/text.py in __call__ 1472 /var/tmp/anaconda-7.0.1//usr/lib/anaconda/todo.py in doInstall 703 /var/tmp/anaconda-7.0.1//usr/lib/anaconda/fstab.py in mountFilesystems 46 /usr/lib/anaconda/isys.py in losetup targ = os.open(file, mode) OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory : '/mnt/loophost/redhat.img'
I figured out another possible way to do the install. The 3480CT has an Intel EtherPro 100 on-board Ethernet interface. So I created a bootnet floppy, booted it and tried the same partitionless install from ftp://sunsite.utk.edu/ This time it got a lot further. It created, mounted the /mnt/loopback/sysimage file system, filled it with packages from the FTP server, and stopped at the point where it was trying to create a boot floppy on /dev/fd0, which doesn't really exist as the machine has a USB floppy. It looks probable that I can do a native install (not partitionless) using the bootnet floppy. This will install LILO and will not need to use the USB floppy after the initial boot. I will do this as soon as I have confirmed that I can use the Toshiba-supplied system restore CDs to get a working Win2K system back if the install goes wrong.
One more note. The Intel EtherPro 100 driver module on the bootnet floppy can only be inserted successfully if the patch cord is not plugged in. Once it has been inserted the cord can be connected and everything works. This should probably be a separate bug ...
The other problems you ran into (including the nonworking PCMCIA IDE CDROM) have been, or are being addressed. Since you can do a network install, I'm going to close this bug.