Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 54360
the bootloader apparently fails
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:37:30 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.3) Gecko/20010816 Description of problem: Trying to install RH on a system with an old (2 1/2 years) Tyan Trinity motherboard (VIA chipset), AMD K6-2 When it tries to launch the boot floppy, is says "boot failed" and it will do nothing. But if you actually hit Enter or TAB, the boot process will start normally. This is very tricky, because it fools you into believeing that the bootloader failed. :-) Unless you are unnerved and hit the keyboard, you would believe it doesn't boot. :-) The very same thing happens when you boot the CD. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Get a Tyan Trinity mobo 2.Insert Linux install floppy/CD 3.Try to boot it Actual Results: It says "boot failed" and doesn't do anything unless you hit Enter or TAB. Expected Results: The bootloader should start normally. Additional info:
I have not seen the behavior before except when I had a bad boot floppy, in which case no amount of pounding on the keyboard would make it boot. I can't explain what would cause this...do you see this behavior in other machines?
The same thing happens exactly the same when booting off the CD-ROM, so it's not the floppy's fault.
Could this be due to a BIOS menu option? Maybe it tries to boot from a completely different device the first time, fails, and then proceeds to the next device according to the order of bootable devices?
Are you sure that the cd is good then? This is very strange behavior. I mean, we're not even dealing with the installer at this point...the kernel isn't even getting booted. This really seems to be a lower level problem either in the installation media or in the hardware itself.
Closing due to inactivity. Please reopen if you have more information.