Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 36689
Installer won't locate driver disk in LS-120 ide floppy drive /dev/hdX
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:32:44 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.77 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.17-14 i686) My floppy drive is an (IDE) LS-120 "SuperDisk" that the kernel detects as /dev/hdd. I can boot from the boot floppy, but when the installer asks me to insert the driver disk, it only looks for the floppy in /dev/fd0, which doesn't exist. And I can't find any way to tell the installer to look for the driver disk in another location, such as /dev/hdd, where my floppy really is. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot the install disk from an ide-floppy device (e.g. LS-120) that would be detected as /dev/hd* 2. At the boot prompt, type 'linux expert dd' to make it request a driver disk 3. When it asks for the driver disk, notice that the installer looks for it in /dev/fd0, which would normally be correct, but not if you have an ide-floppy drive, which is actually /dev/hdd (or whatever -- depends on where the device is installed). The installer will never find the driver disk. Actual Results: The installer complains that it can't find the driver disk in /dev/fd0. Expected Results: The installer should ask the user where the floppy disk (drive) is located, so you can tell it to look in /dev/hdd (or wherever). I have a Gateway Solo 9100 laptop with an LS-120 floppy drive and DVD drive. I really could solve this problem by going out and buying the RedHat CDROM, but I'm trying to install RH7.1 from an NFS partition on my desktop machine, so I need to boot the pcmcia disks (and load the driver disk) to get my CardBus ethernet card to work.
Can you disable your floppy controller in the bios? On my test machine here, I have an LS-120, but no floppy. The driver disk won't work unless I disable the floppy controller in the bios. Otherwise, the kernel sees the controller and assumes that there is a device at /dev/fd0. Try this and tell me if it works.
Yes, that worked! (I had stupidly(?) assumed that disabling the floppy controller in the bios would render the LS-120 drive completely disabled -- i.e. non-functional.) I should have tried it anyway. Thanks for the help!!