installation problems 4315

This is just a progress report on my attempts to revive my PC that was rendered unbootable by trying to upgrade from RH 7 to RH 9.

I found, for example, boot600.exe. This seems to be a DOS executable, hence one has to have something related to DOS running to execute it. I found another dos boot disk (technically windows, but it only actually launches dos) and booted with it. I copied boot600.exe to it but when I tried to run it, I got an error message saying it can't be run in DOS mode.

The files in the DOS parbreastion of the hard disk are working. E.g. I was able to play Go against one of the programs.

One good thing is that the boot disk I used can see the CDROM drive and told me it is drive k. I was able to change directory to k: but it refused to execute dir k:

The trouble with this one is that it buttumes that your floppy drive can format a 1.44MB floppy with 1.722 MB. Mine apparently can't, but I'll see if I have better luck with some newer floppies or with a floppy drive on another machine.

This one boots and then goes to a certain menu that let's you select what you want to boot from, and also gives the option of rebooting or shutting down the machine. Telling it to boot from the CDROM just hangs it and does nothing. Telling it to boot from HD brings me back to the LI of LILO.

So, this doesn't look like the answer.

I got a RH 5.2 boot disk and root disk out of mothballs. I booted with it. It detected the CDROM as being hdb and I'm now trying to mount it. By executing fdiskdev-hdb I got a little bit of a look at it, but not much. Executing mkdirmnt mkdirmnt-k mount -t iso9660dev-hdb1mnt-k

leads to an error message, complaining that fstype iso9660 is not supported by the kernel. I get a different error message by trying to mountdev-hda3 (the main linux parbreastion of the HD) as ext2 since it has features unsupported by the kernel. That makes some sense since the Linux parbreastions on the HD had RH 7 on them.

I went back to the RH 7 boot disk that I made from the installation CD. I selected linux rescue and booted. I looked in the directorymnt and found that it had two subdirectories: runtime and source. The latter seems to be the contents of the CD ROM. I createdmnt-c and mounteddev-hda3 and, just to experiment, copiedmnt-source-images-vmlinuz to the formerly empty directorymnt-c-boot. So, I can access the CD ROM and the Linux parbreastions of the HD. I just have to know what to copy and where. I think that is addressed in some of the documentation I was referred to earlier and I'll take a look at it.

Anyway, in a nutshell, the progress is realizing that the boot disk, in rescue mode, *does* give me access to the installation CDs, namely asmnt-source. Since I can also mount the parbreastions of the HD, that should suffice eventually. -- 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.