Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 39029
RFE: Need boot disks for systems with USB floppy drives
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:33:01 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) Description of problem: On a Sony 505fx (64M Ram, PII 266mhz, 4GB HD, pccard CDROM(cdrw52)) using a boot floppy created with rawrite from the 7.1 Professional Boxed Set CD 1, with either the boot.img or pcmcia.img files, Set up gets to the first screen, the screen with all the different options and the boot: prompt at the bottom. I choose any installation option and the system responds: Loading initrd.img.............. Loading vmlinuz..... Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue Notes: 1. I have used rawrite and the boot.img from this CDRom to successuflly boot and install on a different machine (Dell desktop) so I don't suspect the disk. 2. It doesn't seem to matter if there is anything in the pcmcia slot, I have tried the CDROM(sony cdrw52), a wireless network card(Aviator),and nothing. They all produce the result recorded above. 3. I suspect it is something in the kernel that doesn't like the basic setup on this laptop. What causes the code to spit out the "Boot Failed:" message? 4. Bios on this machine, Pheonix BIOS 4.0 release 6, doesn't support booting from the pcmcia slot. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Attempt Install from Floppy created with rawrite on Sony 505fx laptop. 2. 3. Actual Results: Loading initrd.img.............. Loading vmlinuz..... Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue Expected Results: Linux Install screens Additional info: System does not hang up at this point, pressing the enter key reproduces the login selection text.
Moved to correct product (Red Hat 7.1) and component (installer).
Hi I have a similar problem trying to install rh7.1 onto a Sharp Actius PC-AX10 ultralight notebook. The laptop comes with a usb bootable floppy drive. I had no problems installing rh7.0 using bootnet.img disk but when using the new rh7.1 images it stops at vmlinuz... and no other messages and locks up the computer and keyboard. None of the boot images work. Can the older images be used to install the newer version or can i create my own install disk? Mine is not a boxed set but from a computer mag. Thanks
assigned to the right owner
Are you sure that the boot disks are ok? The "boot failed" message usually means that there's something wrong with the floppy. Can you boot from the cdrom drive?
Hi I am the sharp owner. Mine does not come up with a "Boot failed" error like the sony owner. I didn't create a new bug report since the error is similar. In my case i don't have the cdrom option for this machine as it was too expensive. I am trying to install via ftp since the notebook has a built in network card. I have tried the cd and the boot disk in a desk top and both boot ok. The boot disk fails on the vmlinuz image load on the notebook ie Loading initrd.img.............. Loading vmlinuz... It then just hangs the system until i switch it off. Carl
Carl, we've had a number of reports about installation problems on various sub-notebooks...all with the same basic problem. It seems that many people don't get the CDROM option because of the high price. So, they are forced to use the boot disks. For laptop systems, you need two floppy disks. The first one (pcmcia.img) is the boot disk, and the second one (pcmciadd.img) is the driver disk. Here's the crux of the problem: they floppy device is usually a USB device on these kinds of systems. The BIOS supports booting off the USB floppy, so the boot disk gets loaded. The boot disk then prompts you for the driver disk, but the USB drivers necessary to load the driver disk are not on the first disk...they are on the driver disk. So, it's a chicken and egg problem. The problem is that there is so little room on the boot disks. A possiblity for future releases is to make another set of boot disks for all-USB systems. Unfortunately, I can't think of a workaround for you with 7.1 unless you can borrow a CDROM drive to do the install with. :(
Hi Yes i did find that problem out with the pcmcia disks. My alternatives were to install via ftp using the single bootnet disk. I have a desktop machine runnung rh6.1 with a network card installed, the notebook also has a network card built in. I used the bootnet.img boot disk from rh7.0 edition and i have successfully installed rh7.0 onto the notebook using ftp. What i wanted to do was update/reinstall to rh7.1 on the notebook, but the new bootnet disk from rh7.1 no longer boots. It just seems strange that rh7.0 disks boot ok and rh7.1 do not. I will be looking a borrowing a cdrom from the people i bought it from or grit my teeth and buy one. thanks for your help Carl
The difference between the boot disks is that we switched to the 2.4 kernel in 7.1. The 2.4 kernel is bigger than 2.2 (no matter how much we stripped out for the boot disk kernel), so that took up even more space on the boot disk. I know I'm stating the painfully obvious here, but floppies just aren't big enough for many uses these days. Subnotebooks and other devices without CDROM drives are going to become an even bigger problem if the floppy is the only way to get data onto them. It's just a limitation of the hardware...it would be nice if you could netboot them with something like PXE, but that requires work from the hardware makers. I'm turning this into an RFE for specialized boot disks for all USB devices.
*** Bug 41172 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Fixed in CVS.