I'm trying to install red hat 5.. won't boot from the dvd. It has the prompt "Boot from CD: " but just goes into booting windows, which I don't want. Any other disc will boot fine in this machine, and any machine i put the dvd into will pull it up just fine. What am I doing wrong?
Try burning RH5 to a different media disc, sometimes you get computability issues. Also in bios you could try disabling the boot-up option from hard disk to allow it more time to try and access the dvd.
Well I hate to tell you but disabling other boot up options won't allow more time for the system to access the DVD. For each boot device, the bios looks for a boot record, and then moves down in the priority list.
if you know that to be the case why post? clearly the boot cd has no boot record as you say! I've had cases where dirty/scratched cd's take time before booting or failing to boot and continue booting from the HD. most likely a coaster or media compatibility issue.
I said I know that removing the HDD from boot priority wouldn't help. Not why it isn't booting and how to fix it.
If you say so but like I said it HAS has helped me in the past! would recommend anyone else to try it if there having similar problems, well anyone who is willing. Sure it might not help in your case but you can never dismiss it as more often than not the simplest things you don't try can solve problems.
Yeah just for kicks I installed Fedora, PCLinux and a few others and everything works fine. Could it be a corrupted iso file I downloaded?
yeh ok, corrupted download could be a good possibility but you said it booted fine on other machines.
Well ok sorry, it read the disc in windows without throwing errors. The machine itself will boot other discs, however it's having a problem at the moment with booting fedora 9, says it cant read the bootloader or something.
ok, it does sound like a corrupted download, do a md5 check on the downloaded file to see if its corrupt.
download MD5 Checker - Free software downloads and reviews - CNET Download.com, you give it the file you downloaded, it should return you the md5 checksum, the original checksum (the one it should match up with) should be available from the site you downloaded the ISO.
I assume you mean Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5? Red Hat 5 came out in 1997. In the former case, I'd look into CentOS 5.2 instead. It's exactly the same as RHEL5.2, except with the Red Hat logos removed. This is the completely free, legal, and hassle-free Red Hat for home users, labs, etc. where no support contract with Red Hat corporation is needed.
Well on the machine I'm using, CentOS kind of hangs after I skip the CD check, which passes when run. I'm struggling with a pclinux permissions problem if anybody cares to help. Just for copying/overwriting files for my web server.
I'd be glad to help, but it's a different topic, so you might want to start a new thread on that one.