On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 09:57:54PM -0700, Keith Keller wrote:
Hi all,
I'm having a bit of an issue booting the full 5.7 install CD on an older machine. I downloaded the ISOs earlier today, checked the sha1sums, and burned the CDs with no reported errors. But when I try to boot, the isolinux banner comes up quickly, but then instead of the boot prompt, I get a completely blank screen. After 30-60 seconds, I get a message in purple, the exact wording I don't recall, but something like "can't boot, please restart".
Many years ago I put CentOS 4 on this machine, so I know it can boot CD media, and earlier today I booted an older UBCD, so I know that it can successfully boot from CD at the present time. (I didn't have time to test the CD I burned in another box; I will do that next time I have the CD.)
What other options do I have for getting 5.7 on this box? I have a few ideas:
--do some troubleshooting with the 5.7 CD. I don't really know how to go about this, and there's no guarantee it'll end up with being able to boot in the end. --perhaps an older CentOS 5 ISO will work better? Testing this will be fairly quick but is not sure to work. --remove the system disk, put it into another system that is known to boot the 5.7 CD, install there, then put the disk back. This could be somewhat time consuming (the machine is in a rack, and the system drive is buried in the chassis, not hot-swappable), but is pretty sure to work. --try to boot from USB. As I said, it's an old box, so I'm not sure it supports booting over USB media. There were no "boot from USB" options in the BIOS; I could try to flash the firmware, but that seems excessive for this sort of issue.
Other thoughts/suggestions? Any ideas why I'd be seeing this particular boot behavior? It's not something I've seen before; either booting fails before even reaching isolinux, or the kernel panics on finding some exotic and/or broken piece of hardware.
--keith
-- kkeller@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
Keith, I don't see that you identify what sort of old machine you're trying to use.
You should be aware that current versions of Centos/RHEL REQUIRE some flavor of i686-class processor at minimum. that means Pentium Pro/Pentium II or later.
Of course, you may also be hitting some situation where there's some really obsolete hardware in the machine for which newer systems don't have the driver built in.
or a bad image burn, too, since you say you haven't yet tested it.
Good luck!