CD-RW , DVD-ROM and i810 chip

[jamesbond007]

Intel Celeron 1.1 Ghtz.
Intel 810 chip.
LG FD-RW 52x32x52x
BenQ DVD-ROM 16x50x

Primary master : Harddisk
Primary Salve : DVD-ROM
Secondary master : CD-RW
Secondary slave : None

Fedora Core 3 and Mandrakelinux 10.1 cannot be installed on this

configuration, although Red Hat Linux 9 was installed several times on

this system (CD-RW and DVD-ROM not installed on system then), the only

difference now is that, recently I bought CD-RW and DVD-ROM and

installed on my system. I made several attempts to install these OS ,

installation is fine but the bootloader does'nt seem to appear after

installation.
I tried three different bootloaders lilo, grub and xosl, but,

none seem to boot the OSes (infact xosl does appear but it boots only

XP and does'nt boot Linux). Since I knew RH9 would install on my system

I tried to install it, to my utter dismay, even it showed the response(

installation is fine but the grub does'nt appear).Do you think the

culprit could be DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives as i810 chips do not support

them.
I used bootable DVD-ROM discs for both FC3 and Mandrake

installation, do suggest me to remove CD-RW and DVD-ROM and try to

install the OS with CD-ROM drive with CD-ROM disks. Don't say that Iam

a linux newbie, I have been Linux for the last 3 years and I had never

had such a prob. Please help

[klinux]

LOADLIN : try this for booting into existing boot partition on ur hdd .
http://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/~lermen/

steps . since its xp , it might be a bit tricky .

make a boot floppy of 98 or just plain sys A: floppy .
copy loadlin.exe , vmlinuz and if need be initrd.gz from ur linux cd/dvd to the floppy .

restart , run loadlin and once ur into linux . use next step :

http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/ntldr.php

mount ur ntfs partition and copy the boot file or just copy it to floppy and restart . make changes to boot.ini and hopefully it should work .

if ur able to get linux to boot from ntldr , u can try experimenting with grub and lilo , by installing it from within linux . try installing boot loaders in beginning of partition if mbr installation doesnt work .

PS : if u used ur HDD disk manager to create ur hdd partitions , it might cause probs with lilo and grub , so check ur hdd manufacturer is this is an issue too .

[jamesbond007]

Well thanx Klinux for that patient reply, but I guess I did'nt present my question properly. Anyway what I want to say is I got RH9 CD along ago (more that a year ago), and I have been using it since then. I installed it several times on my system, and I had never encountered any probs what so ever, whenever I used to upgrader XP, my MBR used to get overwritten, but I used to recover it easily. Prior to RH9, I used RH7.3 and Solaris. So all these 3 years or so I never really had any probs related to boot loaders.
However two months ago I bought LG CD-RW and BenQ DVD-ROM and installed them on my system. I did not install Linux as I was waiting for Fedora Core 3 DVD. After getting the FC3 DVD I tried to install it, however the DVD didnt boot, hence I posted a quetion whether the DVD was bootable. After a lot of googling I was able to find out that for the i810 and i815 the CD-RW and DVD-ROMs should be installed on the primary IDE so that they can be used as bootable devices. I did so and my present config is as above quoted.
Then I went out to install FC3 from my DVD-ROM, the installation is smooth infact faster than RH9, but when I reboot GRUB does'nt fire and no error messages are displayed. Similar was the fate of the Mandrake 10.1 bootable DVD. I tried to install RH9 and to my utter dismay even this showed the similar prob. I tried grub, lilo and xosl but no use. Finally I decided to go with loadlin hence I copied loadlin and Vmliuz from the CD to c: drive and from the Dos prompt I issued the following command:

c:\> loadlin c:\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda8

/dev/hda8 is the linux root partition.
It looks to boot fine untill I get the following message :

VFS : Mounted root ( ext2 filesystem) read only.
Freeing unused kernel memory : 104k freed
Warning : unable to open an initial console
attempt to access beyond end of device
03:08 : rw=0, want = 1219858868, limit= 5254168
attempt ot access beyond end of device
03:08 : rw=0, want = 1219858868, limit= 5254168
kernel panic : no init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

Iam an experienced Linux user but not kernel guru, hence I couldnt get the head and tail of what it means. If you can help me here....
My next question is shall remove CD-RW and DVD-ROM devices and install my cd-ROM back and try to install FC3 and Mandrake from CDs ?
------------------

[klinux]

well , since u have ur hdd now on the secondary ide , i presume its master , trying running loadlin with root as /dev/hdc8 for secondary master or /dev/hdd8 for secondary slave .

i havent used grub (ever) , but i think the drive letters changing because of shifting of ur drives from primary ide to secondary might cause the problem .

this is a sample of my lin.bat for debian

"

smartdrv /c
loadlin vmlinu~1.27- root=/dev/hdc16 ro initrd=initrd~1.27-

"

i extracted both vmlinuz and initrd with explore2fs in win98 from debian partition .

another thing is try downloading and running each of the loadlin versions , a , b and c . that too might cause this error with loadlin . most linux distro's give out the older version of loadlin , hence a lot of problems