If your web browser formats this page incorrectly, try viewing the page source. In netscape 4, click the view menu, then click page source. 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.