[ale] Strange happenings, can't boot either CentOS or Fedora core 4 from either disk or CD.

[Jim]

Jim wrote:
> This is a strange box anyway, I bought it from Monarch a while back,
> just a case, memory and a mb/cpu.  It's a A7V600 model.  Initially it
> didn't find either my 30 Gb hard drive or the ancient CDROM drive.  It
> did find a 20 G and a 40 G, so I just swapped drive around and bought a
> DVD writer for it.  I went out and bought a dual core Intel MB this
> weekend, and took the A7V600 and put it in an older box replacing a 600
> Mhz Celeron board.  It didn't like that CDROM either plus it wouldn't
> boot FC4.  I figured I'd have to reinstall FC4 but couldn't because the
> CD drive wasn't being found.  By the way, that was the BIOS that didn't
> find it no matter what I did.  Same for the 30 G drive.
>
> Anyway, I have both a FC4 and CentOS CD and neither of them boot.  It
> gets to the boot: line, I hit enter and it loads linuz, initrd,  clears
> the screen and ...  nothing.  Same as the disk image.  I tried adding
> the acpi=off and debug to the boot line, but it didn't help.
>
> This is a multiboot system.  It had two flavors of SuSE and maybe two of
> Debian, but for sure one.  In all those systems it works fine, after I
> corrected the strange drive mapping this system did for me. It also
> boots Knoppix since that's how I fixed the menu.lst and fstabs before I
> got the OSs working that I did.
>
> Anyway does anyone have any suggestions?
>
> Thanks,
> Jim.
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> Ale at ale.org
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>
>
>
>   
Just for the record, I had three hard drives in this system.  I had
purchased a 2nd IDE controller pci board for the third drive.  As a last
ditch effort, I disconnected the ribbon cable to this board.  Now it
boots.  It turns out most 2.6 kernels won't boot.  SuSE and Knoppix were
the exception, CentOS, FC4 and Debian 3.1 2.6 kernels wouldn't make it
past first base.  In fact they didn't even leave the plate.

Jim.