I am installing Red Hat 9 (using boot disk) on my Athlon XP 2400 workstation andI get to the point where it asks:

"What type of media contains the packages to be installed?" I choose the Local CDROM option and it reports: No driver found
Unable to find any devices of the type needed for this installation typ?...etc.

This is a Standard CDR drive and I have tried another regular CD drive in my previous h/w configurations (didn't work either). Shouldn't the boot disk load a driver to see a CDR/CD drive? I remember in the RH 7 Unleashed book by Bill Ball that there was a boot: xxxxx to force it to use a CD drive. In that install (RH 7) it couldn't see a CD drive as well. I also checked RH.com for the latest updates for boot disk images and there were not any. So....what are the typical solutions for when an boot disk install does not see the CD/CDR drive.

My first attempt was with a CD I burned myself. It didn't work,so I bought the retail CD workstation...still didn't work....


TIA!

The problem seems to be pretty pervasive if you do a google search. Oddly enough, none of the same searches bring up anything on the Red Hat or Linux Wide search mechanisms. I have an old Dell GXPro 200 dual processor machine that I've been running linux on forever. This is the first time I've run into this thing where the installation diskette can't find any drivers for anything. Like I said, there are plenty of people out there experiencing the same thing with multiple machines, so hopefully an answer will materialize eventually. Please post if you stumble on a solution and I'll do the same!

Thanks,
Al

I have a Dell 333Mhz machine that I just upgraded to RH 9 (from 7.2). I can't remember all this EXACTLY but I did have the same problem with Redhat not recognizing my CDROM drive. I have a SCSI I/O system. My hard drive, CDROM drive and CDRW drive are all SCSI. When I installed REDHat 6 originally it had no problem recognizing my cdrom drive. Anyway I put the CD into the drive and get a splash screen. When it tries to install RH 9 I get some error saying it can't find the media. I can't remember the exact error. The message on the screen said something about taking the file bootdisk.img and drvblock.img and create a boot disk with those images.

So I took the CD out and put it in one of my other Linux machines. I copied the files /images/bootdisk.img and /images/drvblock.img from the RH 9 installation CD 1 (there are three installation cds. you will find these files on the first CD) right onto the floppy by using the dd command. The first bootable disk contains bootdisk.img and the other floppy contains drvblock.img. I used the following command to create the first floppy from the bootdisk.img file:

dd bs=2x80x18b if=/mnt/cdrom/images/bootdisk.img of=/dev/fd0/bootdisk.img

Do a man dd to see what "if" and "of" means. bs = block size. A floppy has 18 sectors per track, two heads and 80 cylinders hence, 2x80x18b. 18b specifies 18 sectors of 512 bytes. The "x" means multiply. If you multifply these out you get 1474560 bytes (1.44 Mbytes the size of all floppies). This command issues a single 1474560 byte read request to /dev/fd0 and a single 1474560 byte write request to /mnt/floppy. I assume you mount your floppy under /mnt. When you are done make sure you unmount your floppy DON'T just hit the eject button to take it out because Linux doesn't always write to the device immediately so you may end up ejecting the disk before it actually starts making the disk. When you are done type "umount /mnt/floppy". My system didn't actually start writting to the disk until I typed umount /mnt/floppy. Then the little green light came on for a long time (maybe a minute). I waited till it went out and then ejected the disk. I put it back in the drive on the same computer and mounted it to see if the disk was indeed created. I found four files, boot.msg, initrd.img ldlinux.sys,syslinux.cfg,vmlinuz. Those were containted in the image that was written to the disk. I then unmounted it again and stuck it in the original Dell 333Mhz computer so that I could start the installation process. I still had to create the driver disk so that my Dell system could boot from my cdrom drive. So I used the same dd command to copy the drvblock.img over to another floppy. The exact command I typed was: (make sure you mount the floppy first)

dd bs=2x80x18b if=/mnt/cdrom/images/drvblock.img of=/dev/fd0/drvblock.img

The floppy drive light came on for about a minute (it seemed like a long time) and then went out. I unmounted the floppy and then remounted it to make sure I REALLY had a driver disk. I found the following files on the disk: modinfo, module.cgz, modules.dep, pcitable, rhdd-6.1.

After putting in the first bootable disk to load linux I had to put in the driver disk so that it could find my cdrom drive. I was prompted to do this if I can remember right. Anyway after I put in the driver disk and it loaded the drivers for the CDROM I saw my cdrom light come on. I can remember now if I was prompted to continue or if linux just automatically started booting off the cdrom drive. The installation was normal after having to create those the boot disk and the driver disk. Seems like a lot doesn't it. I went smooth though.

try going into bios setup and switching boot sequence to CD-ROM, A,C
Then use the to install

I too had the same problem but it was the media. I had a burned copy; try to do that MD5 thingy where it checks the cd for correctness.

I can't remember how to do it because when I finally got RH9 to work I hated it for it's lack of really anything and then switched to my favorite distro Suse linux 9.0 professional.