Failure to boot install-disk from SCSI CD-ROM drive.

[Mark J. Dulcey]

John Aspinall wrote:
> I'm trying to do a Mandrake 9.0 install from CD.  The machine in question is an old Pentium 1 with two disks and a CD-ROM drive, all on its SCSI chain.  The SCSI diagnostics check out ok, and the machine will boot Windows without a problem.  The CD itself
> works to boot on a different machine.  I set the CD-ROM drive first in the preferred boot order with the BIOS.
> 
> I'm guessing here, but it looks like the boot loader loads ok.  But then I get the following:
> 
> ISOLINUX 1.76  Mandrake Linux isolinux: Loading spec packet failed, trying to wing it...
> isolinux: Failed to locate CD-ROM device; boot failed.
> 
> The obvious question: can anyone shed light here?

The problem in one word: SCSI.

Your machine has SCSI boot support in its BIOS, so the boot loader is able to load. But the boot loader itself doesn't have support for your SCSI adapter, so it can't load the kernel. Even if the kernel were loaded, it probably wouldn't have support for the SCSI adapter built-in, though your distribution might have a pre-boot RAMdisk with the appropriate driver in it. (I haven't tried Mandrake, so I couldn't say.)

You will probably have to use floppies to install on that machine, or scrounge up an IDE CD-ROM drive.