(I think this is a bug!) With my PowerEdge2300 I cannot boot from the RedHat 5.2 CDROM unless my floppy drive is installed and enabled. I'm not booting from floppy and there is no diskette in the drive. The system hangs just after it "discovers" the bootable media in the cdrom drive. Normally, the system would continue discovering devices on my other SCSI bus after discovering the bootable media. With the floppy (and no diskette in the drive!) I boot fine. Without the floppy I hang. I've tried enabling/disabling floppy controller in the CMOS setup. The bootable WinNT cdrom does not hang the system with or without the floppy. It gets booted up and starts installing. (I tried the WinNT cdrom to try to isolate the problem to RedHat or my hardware. I do not dual-boot WinNT. This machine is exclusively Linux.) This is not a severe problem-I removed the floppy drive, which I don't need, to make room for a Zip drive. I now have the floppy mounted internally as a workaround.
This has been assigned to our hardware certification person for further review.
The problem is not actually a Red Hat 5.2 problem. It has been confirmed from Dell and Adaptec that the problem is a BIOS bug. Specifically, when the Adaptec BIOS attempts to move Drive A to Drive B and no Drive A exists, then it crashes the machine. The Windows NT CD-ROM does not cause this problem because it uses the Torino CD-ROM extension for booting instead of the emulated floppy extension that Red Hat uses. No new BIOS has been made for the machine at this time, and the current solution is that once the system is installed, don't boot from the Red Hat 5.2 CD-ROM and you can do what-ever you wish with the floppy. If you must be able to boot from CD-ROM that uses the floppy style boot extension, then further action will be needed. In either case, it isn't really a Red Hat problem, it specifically is a Dell problem, so this trouble ticket will be closed out.