It started off well. I dragged an old computer up from the basement, put in a brand new hard drive, and started to install RedHat 9 fresh out of the box.

Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple. The BIOS is from 1999 and it doesn’t know how to boot from a CD. But the Norton Ghost floppy I’d made boots into PC DOS which then recognizes the CD, and we were off and running.

But RedHat reported that the second CD was corrupt, which I find unlikely since it’s fresh out of the sleeve and has no obvious scratches. But, well, what the heck. I’ll just reboot and start again. Heck, it’s just like installing Windows after all!

But Linux has killed my hard drive. My system tries to boot from it but hangs. The BIOS is old enough that I can’t force it to boot from the floppy. [Note: Ok, so I just found where in the BIOS it lets me boot from the CD. I’m not as screwed as I’d thought.]

I was so excited as the first CD was chugging away. Now I’m a bitter, cynical old man who is forever going to chase children off his lawn.

LATER: Booting from the CD. Let’s see how well RedHat recovers from its maybe bogus problem with the second CD. I’m excited again.

LATER: Before the first disk finished its re-install from scratch, my system went back to terminal (non-graphical) mode and told me that install has terminated abnormally, right after X server started succfessfully. It’s unmounted a bunch of filesystems and is telling me I may safely reboot my system. So, I don’t know if it’s broken or not…

It’s not booting from the hard disk. I’ll move on to attempt #3.

I just ran linux rescue. It seemed to work, or at least it didn’t complain. But I can’t see that it did me any good. I’m rebooting and starting to reinstall.

This time I’ve told RedHat that it’s an upgrade, not a reinstall. It’s at least asking me about boot loaders. Maybe this time the hard drive will learn how to boot itself rather than going into the terminal twitches. Hmm, now it tells me that “No kernel packages were installed on your system. Your boot loader configuration will not be changed.”

Ooh! Ooh! It’s asking me if I want to make a boot diskette! The massive oak door of Linux is about to swing open. I’m about to be given the key! It’s also further than I’ve gotten so far in this multi-try installation. In fact, RedHat is announcing that the installation is complete. I must be missing a heck of a lot of packages, though, since I only made it through Disk 1.

Damn. It’s still not booting from the hard drive. And with the bios set to boot from the CD first, the system is hanging if the CD is empty. I’ll switch the boot order and try booting from my spiffy new Linux floppy.

Booted from the floppy. It’s now noticing (for the first time?) my mouse and USB ports. Progress, I assume. Damn, now it’s asking for localhost login, but I never gave it a user name or pwd and I don’t know what the defaults are. Googling it on my Windows machines takes me to redhat.com where it almost explains it: If I didn’t create a user account during the installation (which I didn’t because installation terminated abnormally), I can log in as root and use the pwd I created for the system. Ok, but it’s not real clear how to log in as root. So, I’ll do the obvious thing and type “root.” And it works. It doesn’t even ask me for a pwd. But, now what? I’m at a command prompt and about all I remember from Unix is that “ls” lists files and “rm *.*” probably isn’t a good idea, and it would be an even worse idea if I remembered the parameter that makes it recursive.

My nephew, Greg LinuxMan Cavanagh, who administers Linux clusters for a place where you need special clearance, suggests that I try telling the bios that my disk is smaller than it is since Linux just needs to install a loader and will figure out the actual size once it loads, which is pretty cool. But, unfortunately, changing the disk size has no effect.

Onto my 4th attempt to install it. This time I’m telling it to switch from the GRUB boot loader, hoping that this will force it to load a frigging boot loader. Also, I’m telling it I want to configure which packages should be installed, again hoping that this will force the RedHat installer out of its complacency. I’ve just told it to install all 4.5 gig of packages, figuring that if I pick and choose, I am guaranteed to fail to pick the ones I need. It’s chugging along. I’ll try to stay up long enough to see if it rejects the second CD again, but it’s getting late and I have to get up early tomorrow…

Disk 2 is in and this time it’s working. (So far.) I think I’ll head off to bed.

One more quick check…and it seems to have frozen while installed “evolution.” I’m not going to blame Linux for this. Could be a hardware problem. Nope, still not booting from the hard drive.

Good night.

Categories: Uncategorized dw