Boot bother, part 2
I am trying to load Linux on a rather ancient Compaq Prosignia P1 vvith a SCSI CD-ROM and a smart array controller. I have used the 4.60 smartstart CDs to erase the current set-up and prepare the system for Linux. I must say I vvas pleasantly surprised to see that Linux vvas «i selectable operating system on the smartstart CD.
Hovvever, vvhatever I do, I cannot seem to Ket the machine to boot off the Linux bootable CD’s. Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake 7.1 just seem to leave the “blinking” cursor in the top left and you are forced to reboot as the machine fails to respond.
Mandrake’s boot floppy made from the CD comes up a treat vvith TUX and the tvvo options: either auto or manual loads. Both seem to start OK, decompressing vvhat I imagine is the boot instructions, then brings up: “Boot Failed – Please change disks and try again”.
I am reasonably nevv to Linux, but not to (omputers so l’m not phased by having to do things manually, but this has me stumped.
Have you got any ideas?
Thanks for your time and I hope you can help me out.
Pcter tlorris, via email
if H !t seems like Linux is having difficulty ||1 finding your CD-ROM drive. As it is a f 1 SCSI drive, the problem is likely to be the SCSI controller itself, rather than the
particular drive. Most Linux distributions vvill be able to auto-detect the SCSI device and use it, but this seems to be not happening in your case. İt may stili be possible to get it to vvork if it is a supported SCSI device, but you need to knovv exactly vvhat it is.
If it is supported, you vvill be able to force LILO to try and boot from it. Insert your boot floppy and vvhile LILO is loading press and hold Shift (or Alt /control) to get the LILO prompt
Then you can supply kernel options, loading the required modüle. For more detail, see the SCSI HOWTO, The İnstallation HOWTO and related documents (the HTML HovvTos are on the CD in the /LDP/html/ directory). İt’s difficult to ansvver this question vvithout your exact hardvvare specification, but I hope vve have managed to solve your problem.
