Topic: Image won't install????

[terry]

Hello,

I have a real curious problem. I downloaded the iso, burned the CD and installed and configured a machine with no problem, everything worked fine.

I tried installing on another machine that had redhat on it and at one time I had debian installed on it. I booted to the CD, got the 'welcome to e-smith server/gateway' screen. After that however, all that comes up is a blue screen with a blinking cursor. It stayed like that over night, like it was in a lockup condition. I turn off the machine, and it reboots into the RedHat distribution that was on it. Appartently, when I tried to install e-smith, after the 'welcome to e-smith server/gateway' screen, it did nothing, no messages nothing.

Does anyone have any ideas why it did this? Is there something I have done wrong? Is there a way around this?

Thanks for any help.

[Charlie Brady]

terry wrote:

> Does anyone have any ideas why it did this?

I don't have any.

>Is there a way around this?

Make a boot floppy (images/boot.img) and try booting from that instead.

Regards

Charlie

[terry]

Yes,
I did try the installation with a boot image...exact same thing occured.

[Tim Litwiller]

well, since you are already booting to linux fdisk the drive to remove the partitions that are there. One other thought, what boot manager do you currently have? lilo shouldn't be a problem but some of the other comercial ones could be.

[terry]

Yes ... i am using lilo....i will try fdisking to see if that works....thanks

[Charlie Brady]

terry wrote:

> I tried installing on another machine that had redhat on it and
> at one time I had debian installed on it. I booted to the CD,
> got the 'welcome to e-smith server/gateway' screen.

So you got the initial banner, typed "accept", then "proceed", and got the blue screen after that. Is that correct?

> After that
> however, all that comes up is a blue screen with a blinking
> cursor. It stayed like that over night, like it was in a lockup
> condition.

This is the point where the second stage installer is read from the CDROM. If the second stage installer cannot be loaded, you don't get any diagnostics on that screen. At this stage, do Alt-F3, Alt-F4 and Alt-F5 - you will see additional diagnostic messages - one may show you that there is a read error on the CDROM, for instance.

You would get the same whether you booted from CDROM or floppy, so that would match your symptoms.

Regards

Charlie

 I turn off the machine, and it reboots into the
> RedHat distribution that was on it. Appartently, when I tried
> to install e-smith, after the 'welcome to e-smith
> server/gateway' screen, it did nothing, no messages nothing.
>
> Does anyone have any ideas why it did this? Is there something
> I have done wrong? Is there a way around this?
>
> Thanks for any help.
>
>

[Damien Curtain]

try md5sum /dev/cdrom and compare this to the checksums on the ftp site, beyond that you may need to be more specific as to the hardware you have.

--
 Damien

[Geoff Bennion]

Another thing to try (I had the same problem, but this somehow solved it).

Boot from floppy disk - WITHOUT the cd in the drive.

Keep going thru the prompts, and it should then ask you for the CDROM, insert it now and try.

(I've also had a problem where if there is a CD in the drive when I boot e-smith, I get a message saying that the CDROM drive is confused! )