installation problems 4306

Mark Hobley provided some confirmation of my theory that the CDROM drive is flaky and that is contributing to my problems:

I looked at his website. The drive I have been discussing is apparently made by Accesstek Inc., 10F-1 Number 285 Sec.2 Guang Fu Rd., Hsinchu, China and is a CD-R-RW drive Model Number CW5205

When I originally installed RH7 on this machine, I think I used a different CDROM drive, one that didn't have writing capability, namely a Samsung CD-Master 40E Model SC-140. After I installed RH 7, I decided I would like to have a CDROM that could also write, so I replaced it by the one mentioned above. At least, that is what I think I did.

I replaced the CD-R-RW with the original Samsung and tried again to install RH 7 (i.e. to restore the machine to its original condition before installing RH 9 trashed the Linux parbreastions and made the machine unbootable). It couldn't boot from the CDROM but seemed to get further, something about a 2.88 floppy, and when it finally gave up it told me to insert the boot floppy, which I did. I attempted to install in text and selected the Gnome desktop, but got an error message to the effect thatmnt-source-RedHat-RPMS-desktop-backgrounds-1.1-4.noarch.rpm couldn't be opened due to missing file, bad package or bad media. I then rebooted and selected linux rescue. I mounted the hard drive and found that the top directory of the HD contained a file rhinstall-stage2.img which was rather large (around a GB). I don't know what to do with it. I do know that I can put the boot floppy in another PC running RH 7 and copy programs to it that can do things I want done. I just don't know what to copy that knows what to do with the .img file. For example, if I could create a loop device on the HD, I might be able to use dd to copy the contents of the .img file to the loop device. That might at least involve copying dd and also creating a nodedev-loop.

It would be nice to know exactly what the installation programs do, so that I can consider doing their job by hand. At the moment, using the installation disk is more like using a washing machine than like using a computer. -- Ignorantly, * Disclaimer: I am a guest and *not* a member of the MIT CSAIL. My actions and * comments do not reflect in any way on MIT. Also, I am nowhere near Boston.