Description of Problem: I am trying to Load Red Hat Linux 7.1 on a Compaq 5BW160 and everytime I get a boot failure. I have tried boot disks from red Hat 5.2 and 7.1 and I recieve the same problem. When I used the Slackware Installation disk I got all the way till it asked for a root disk that I had not made. How Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Insert Boot disk 2. get the first setup screeen 3. hit enter Actual Results: Boot Failed Expected Results: for the installation to continue Additional Information: I know Compaq has a horrible record with Red Hat Linux, But I would liek to try to install it. My biggets prolem is I don't get a error log file or a verbose setting to find out where the Installation is Failing.
What does the screen say when the boot fails? Also, make sure that you are not mixing boot disks with different versions. Only use 7.1 boot floppies with 7.1. Otherwise, you will see strange behavior.
I don't know Right off the bat I get boot failure after i get the initial screen and hit enter.
What steps did you take to create the boot disks?
i downloaded rawrite and two images boot.img and bootnet.img. I made both on seperate disks. I have been taking to the creator or maintainer or syslinux and I have updated or have the new syslinux 1.63. I have managed to have it load the init....img and try to load the Kernel vmlinuz but it all of a sudden reboots after it finishes loading the kernel.
It sounds like you could be having hardware troubles. I can't think of any other reason for the behavior that you are seeing. If the kernel isn't even getting properly loaded, the Red Hat installer isn't even getting a chance to run. I'm really suspicious of the hardware if the bootdisks from 5.2 *and* 7.1 don't work. Red Hat Linux 7.1 works well with the Compaqs that we have in the test lab, which is pretty much the entire ProLiant line of servers. It works fine on the iPaq desktop and on my Presario 1700T laptop. So I'd be very surprised if it didn't work on yours too, although I'm not familiar with the 5BW160. Can you provide more information about the type of hardware in the machine?
Closing due to inactivity. Please reopen if you have more information.
Hi, I have a similar problem with RHL 7.1 on a Compaq Presario 7470 Desktop. Can start from the /boot directory on the hard disk, but cannot boot from floppy. The error is "Boot Failed: Please change disks and continue". Have attempted with multiple floppy disks, including non-generic (IBM brand, to be specific). Have tried both the mkbootdisk command and the dd command (with if=boot.img or something like that). BTW this is a demo version of 7.1 that came free with the book "Mastering RHL 7.1". NOW, RHL 7.0 installed earlier on this machine from the boxed set had no problems creating the boot disk. COULD IT BE this demo version (only 1 cd) has a somewhat deficient kernel? (I have just recently downloaded the 2.4.2-2 kernel rpm and plan to install it, uh - if that could make any difference ?? ;D ) any clues? please e-mail SHAYGYI Thanks in advance...
shaygyi, as far as I know, 7.1 was a two cd set. It's entirely possible that the publisher of the book you bought modified 7.1 by removing packages so that it would fit onto one cd. Calling it "Red Hat Linux" at that point is pretty misleading. As such, I have no way of knowing what kind of modifications were made or if they would cause the behavior you are seeing. If you have a fast internet connection, I'd suggest downloading Red Hat Linux 7.3, which is our latest version. There have been many improvements since 7.1. It can be found at: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/7.3/en/iso/i386/ If you still have problems with the latest release, please open a new bug report against 7.3. Thanks for your post.
thanks bfox: no, I don't have a fast connection, just 56.6K. However, I do have the 2.4.7-10 kernel rpm (plus headers, etc) that was part of RHL 7.2. So I did all the recommended rpm -Uvh / -Ivh install commands (as per http://www.redhat.com/support/resources/howto/kernel-upgrade/s1-upgrade.html) . Upgrade was successful,however still can't create a boot floppy that works. Am now focusing on how to create a boot cd... :D
TO follow up... have now received the 3-cd RHL 7.3 set from linuxcentral.com... Custom Install successful. New, Improved KDE & Gnome both look sharp. Took the boot disk created in the install process and attempted boot - FAILED! Reformatted (with kfloppy) to ext2 file system (was MSDOS?) and built boot disk with mkbootdisk. Attempted boot - FAILED! A rhetorical question: Is some rare combination of Compaq, LILO, and (what?: kernel size??) causing this??