Need fedora installation help

[Jin Malm]

I burnt fedora core2 four iso images to four CDs.  I've verified that I can 
boot off the first CD on my P4 computer.

I wanted to convert my old Pentium computer to a linux machine.  It has a 
Creative 8x CD-ROM and I manage to boot off the Window CDs but I can't seem 
to boot off the Fedora CD.

Can someone help?

Cheers,
J

[Michael A. Peters]

On 10/30/2004 12:35:23 AM, Jin Malm wrote:
> I burnt fedora core2 four iso images to four CDs.  I've verified that  
> I can boot off the first CD on my P4 computer.
>
> I wanted to convert my old Pentium computer to a linux machine.  It  
> has a Creative 8x CD-ROM and I manage to boot off the Window CDs but  
> I can't seem to boot off the Fedora CD.
>
> Can someone help?

Put the HD from the old pentium into your P4 and install onto that.
Then put HD back into old pentium.
kudzu will probably handle everything.

Linux is good that way - especially with kudzu. Unless you build your  
kernel for a specific arch (ie athlon) it will boot any i386. I *think*  
fedora's kernel does want pentium, but I'm not positive - but that's  
not a problem for you.

[Ben Smith]

Jin Malm wrote:
> I burnt fedora core2 four iso images to four CDs.  I've verified that 
> I can boot off the first CD on my P4 computer.
>
> I wanted to convert my old Pentium computer to a linux machine.  It 
> has a Creative 8x CD-ROM and I manage to boot off the Window CDs but I 
> can't seem to boot off the Fedora CD.
>
> Can someone help?
>
> Cheers,
> J

Hi Jin,

There are a few options for booting from a floppy instead.  Here are a 
couple:

Smart Boot Manager
http://btmgr.webframe.org/

Generic Linux Boot Floppy
http://www.deesconsulting.com/glbf

-Ben Smith
Dees Consulting
www.deesconsulting.com

[James Wilkinson]

Jin Malm wrote:
> I burnt fedora core2 four iso images to four CDs.  I've verified that I can 
> boot off the first CD on my P4 computer.
>
> I wanted to convert my old Pentium computer to a linux machine.  It has a 
> Creative 8x CD-ROM and I manage to boot off the Window CDs but I can't seem 
> to boot off the Fedora CD.

The Windows CD, presumably, is a pressed CD. The Fedorea CDs are CD-Rs
or CD-RWs.

Many CD-ROM drives that old had difficulty reading CD-Rs, and very few
of them could read CD-RWs. Even if they could read the discs, often they
took too long to decide there was something there. So the BIOS would
skip the CD and try other discs.

You could skip the entire issue by temporarily upgrading the Pentium to
a modern CD-ROM, or check compatibility with the drive. If you have an
OS still on the drive, you could watch what happens (especially as far
as time is concerned) as you put the disks in.

I have one drive and motherboard where, if you insert a CD-RW, the drive
spins up, reads it, then spins down again, and won't spin up again fast
enough for the BIOS. So if you want to boot from CD-RW, you have to
insert it at just the right point so that the drive is still spun up
when the BIOS is ready to boot.

Or, as has been suggested, there *are* other methods of getting data
onto the hard drive.

Hope this helps,

James.