When I booted from floppy (from the boot-RHEA-1999:044.img disk), the installer couldn't see my CD in the ATAPI CD-ROM. After I was asked where the installation media was and said `Local CDROM', the screen cleared to blue and there was a very very long pause (several minutes) during which my IDE CD-ROM spun up and down a couple times and its light came on. Then the installation program said `I could not find a RedHat CD in any of your CD-ROM drives'. (Yes, there was one in the drive. :-) Although an ATAPI CD-ROM is pretty vanilla hardware, I guessed that maybe some prior hardware probe might have been causing it to misbehave somehow, so I tried an expert-mode installation. That did not give me an option to read from an ordinary ATAPI CD-ROM drive. However, fortunately I happen to have a SCSI CD-R, which expert mode was able to see. I put the RedHat CD in the SCSI CD-R, and the installer found it and I was able to do the upgrade. After the installation, the CD-ROM was seen normally; dmesg includes: hdb: BCD-16X 1997-03-25, ATAPI CDROM drive hdb: ATAPI 10X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache By the way, the pause after `running /sbin/loader' is extremely long; it might be useful to change that message to `running /sbin/loader; please wait' or precede it with `It is normal for the following step to take a long time' or something like that. (Since I've already accomplished the install, this is a matter of curiosity for me and a bug report, rather than something I personally need a fix for.)
Fascinating. I've since discovered that the problem occurs after installation too - but *just* with the RedHat 6.1 installation CD. I can mount it in my SCSI CD-RW drive, and I can mount other CDs in my ATAPI drive, but I can't mount the RH6.1 install CD in my ATAPI drive. Maybe it's a problem with the media (but a problem that my SCSI drive manages to overcome). Anyway, I suspect this is not a kernel or boot disk bug at this point.
I can't mount the RedHat SRPMs CD from my box set either. (Sometimes I eventually get "no medium found", sometimes the mount attempt just hangs until I ^C it.) I *can* mount the Linux Application Library and PowerTools CDs that came with my (deluxe) boxed set, and other important CDs like my Quake CD.
I am closing out this bug as it appears to have nothing to do with the installer and more to do with recognizing ATAPI cdroms.
I'm (possibly) adding a simular bug regarding this too. But what I found was that if you ejected the CD, and retried the install, it would take off fine.