Thanks to Noam Meltzer, Shaul Karl and Dani Arbel for their suggestions.
They all suggested part (or all) of a quirky combination of substandard
CD, CD-ROM drive and buggy kernel version.
I successfully installed Mandrake 8.1, after I moved the hard disk from
its own controller (/dev/hdc) to the controller used by the CD-R/W drive
(i.e. the hard disk is now seen as /dev/hda).
After installing Mandrake, I manually edited /etc/fstab, and changed the
partition names from /dev/hda* to /dev/hdc*. The lilo was already
installed (the same disk has also a RedHat 7.2 installation, in other
partitions). After booting to RedHat 7.2 and updating /etc/lilo.conf
from there, Mandrake 8.1 successfully booted.
My hypothesis is that the Mandrake CD which I used was substandard, so the
CD-R/W drive had to slow down in order to properly read it, and forcing it
to share the same controller as the hard disk was sufficient.
From: Noam Meltzer
> I had a similar? problem with installing redhat7.1 at work, some time
> ago.
> After booting from the cd the installer got stuck on a blue screen (or
> other screen, if you chose advanced/textual install) while it tried to
> access the cdrom. The problem was solved by replacing the cd-rom to an
> older one (we have standard hardware there), and then installing.
> Now, after the installation, if you returned to the original cd-rom
> driver it got stuck while booting.
> The solution was to compile a new kernel. Probably the 2.4.5 kernel
> supplied with redhat 7.1 had some unique bug to a specific hardware
> configuration, like we have there.
From: Shaul Karl
> A bad CD? Are you able to read the relevant files (which ones?) from
> one of the working Linux distros?
> Where exactly in the installation process are you encounter this
> problem (immediately after boot, when trying to actually install the
> selected packages etc)?
From: Dani Arbel
> Omer,
> We had such problems and it was resolved by using high grade cd media ....
> Dani
>
> On Sat, 1 Dec 2001, Omer Zak wrote:
>
> > When trying to install Mandrake 8.1, the installer got stuck at the step
> > at which it displays the "Trying to access a CDROM disc" message.
> > The strange thing is that the installer was successfully booted from the
> > CDROM.
> >
> > Any hints where to look for the problem? How to work around it?
> >
> > System configuration (let me know if more information is needed):
> > Pentium II 300MHz, 384MB memory
> > /dev/hda - none
> > /dev/hdb - Yamaha CRW2200 CD/RW
> > /dev/hdc - a 40GB hard disk (only the first 33GB are recognized due to a
> > BIOS limitation)
> > /dev/hdd - none
> >
> > Mandrake Linux 8.1 - from the CD-ROM set sold during the Linux Day at
> > Bar-Ilan U.
> >
> > The hard disk already has RedHat 7.2 and OpenBSD 2.9 installed in it, and
> > it multi-boots using lilo. When formatting the disk, I reserved few
> > partitions for the planned Mandrake installation.
--- Omer
There is no IGLU Cabal. However, Mandrake 8.1 was successfully installed,
and it is now time to sort out the remaining problems (such as an ISDN
driver which gets the computer stuck when it detects unauthorized source
code change, probably due to failure in autodetection algorithm).
WARNING TO SPAMMERS: see at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
