[PLUG] RH 8.0 CD

Derek Loree derek at infotects.com
Tue Nov 12 19:50:39 UTC 2002


On Mon, 2002-11-11 at 21:12, Dirk Ouellette wrote:
> I downloaded, burned & updated my RH 7.3 with the RH 8.0 cd's. Now when 
> I try to upgrade my wife & daughter's RH 7.3 machines, the first RH 8.0 
> cd isn't seen as bootable by either of their machines. The cd's I burned 
> are cd-rw. Is there some way the RH 8.0 CD #1 lost its boot flag?

No such thing, either the CD-reader can read the boot sector of the CD,
or it can't.  There are many factors that determine whether or not a
CD-reader will boot.  The most difficult CD's to boot are CD-RW's, the
re-burnable coating is not as reflective as single burn CD's and
CD-readers have more problems with re-writable CD's than other types.

The firmware of the CD-reader and the motherboard BIOS play a part, some
of the older ones can only handle the "floppy emulation" that El Torito
boot disks use (when this boots, you have a virtual a: drive that
consists of the boot image, the real a: drive becomes the b: drive and
the CD cannot be accessed without CDROM drivers being loaded).  Some of
the newer ones can only handle the "iso boot" that isolinux does.  Some
can do either without any problems.

I guess the first thing to try is to burn to a CD-R, if that doesn't
work then, try swapping the CD-reader that doesn't boot with one that
does.  If it still won't boot, then the motherboard is getting in your
way and your going to have to come up with another boot method or
motherboard.

BTW, I had a laptop CD-reader (no floppy drive in the machine) that
wouldn't boot a Win98 floppy image.  It would boot isolinux, Win2k, and
FreeDOS, but not Win98, even when it was loaded with the isolinux
"floppy emulator" emulator memdisk.  There are some mysteries that will
never be solved.

Good Luck

Derek Loree







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