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installing redhat 5.0 with a Phillips cm206 cdrom drive

There are three problems with installing redhat 5.0 with a Phillips cm206
cdrom drive. The install program does not load the driver modules correctly.
The boot and supplemental floppies do not include a working version of
mount. And the driver is unreliable.

If you try to install redhat 5.0 with a Phillips cm206 cdrom drive, the
install program fails to find and mount the cdrom. The problem is that the
install program does not load the cdrom driver modules correctly. The driver
is divided into two modules, cdrom.o and cm206.o. cdrom.o must be loaded
before cm206.o. If you are using kerneld, you just load cm206.o, and kerneld
automatically loads cdrom.o before cm206.o. However, kerneld is not used by
the redhat 5.0 install program. The install image includes both cdrom.o and
cm206.o, but the install program attempts to load cm206.o without loading
cdrom.o. So cm206.o fails to load because of unresolved symbols, and thus
the install program fails.

If we could manually load module cdrom.o before running the install program,
then the install program would be work. Unfortunately, the install program
will not let us change virtual terminals and enter commands at the prompt
until after it has mounted the cdrom, and we need to enter the command to
load module cdrom.o before the cdrom can be mounted.

We can boot from the boot and supplemental floppies, and then manually load
module cdrom.o and cm206.o. But then there is no way to restart the install
program.

There is also no way to mount the cdrom, because the limited version
of mount on the supplemental floppy is incapable of mounting a
readonly drive like a cdrom. I tried using mount -r, and mount said it did
not recognize option -r. I tried mount without -r, and mount said it could
not mount a readonly drive readwrite. However, I never tried mount -o ro,
so I do not know if mount -o ro works or not.

Maybe we could compile a new kernel which has cdrom.o compiled in, and then
maybe the install program would work. Or maybe we could change and recompile
the install program so that the install program loads cdrom.o before
cm206.o.

Even if we could mount the cdrom, the cm206 driver is not reliable. When
loading the driver module, about one time in eight the module fails to
intialize and we get a trashing interrupt vectors error message, and then
the driver cannot be used or unloaded because it is not working; we have to
reboot. Even when the module loads correctly, there are frequent IO errors
reading the cdrom. Every time an IO error occurs, we need to reread that
data. However, IO errors are displayed to the terminal but not reported to
the program which requested the data; the program which requested the data
has no way of knowing if an IO error occured. Even if a program requests a
reread, the kernel will give the same corrupted data from the buffer instead
of doing a reread; to force a reread we must clear the buffer first, and
then request a reread.

I was using a 486DX-33 with 16M of memory; maybe the driver would be
reliable with a faster computer.

I think that all redhat versions 4.x, 5,x, and 6.x have the same problems.

So any sensible person can see that installing redhat 5.0 with a
Phillips cm206 cdrom drive is too difficult, and should not be
attempted. However, I have done it. I installed DOS onto one
partition. I copied a Slackware 2.3.0 cdrom to the DOS
partition. I installed Slackware 2.3.0 onto another partition. I
copied the redhat 5.0 kernel and modules to the DOS partition. Then I used
loadlin to boot the redhat 5.0 kernel with the Slackware 2.3.0 
partition, mounted the DOS partition, loaded the modules, mounted the
cdrom, and used rpm to install all the rpm packages onto yet another
partition. Every time an
IO error occurred, I unmounted and remounted the cdrom and
then reinstalled that rpm package.
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