No CD block device from LiveCD, then "unable to find a medium containing a live file"

[mlreta]

Friends:

First, the message on the title only happens with Ubuntu. In Fedora, it just stops booting from LiveCD with "WARNING: Cannot find root file system!". The rest of the symptoms are the same.

I'm trying to install Fedora 13 from LiveCD on an IBM i Series notebook (model 1161-21X). It's a Celeron powered unit with RAM expanded to 512MB. It has a 10GB HDD, and an internal CD-ROM drive. Although it has two USB ports (1.1), it cannot boot from a USB drive, so no pendrive nor external CD unit solution possible.

When I boot from LiveCD, it stops booting with the message above. Looking at dmesg, there's no CD-ROM driver loaded. Also, there's a char device for sg0, but no block device for it, so no way to mount it. It seems that the driver module has been removed from the kernel. I'm currently running Fedora Core 5 in it. This very same problem happens with any Ubuntu newer that 6 or any Fedora post 7.

Is there any way to get the CD-ROM to work with the LiveCD? Am I stuck with FC5?

Thanks in advance,

Mariano López Reta
Buenos Aires, Argentina

[mwesten]

No idea why the internal CD doesn't work, but it is possible to boot a USB pendrive on a machine with no BIOS support for it. Using USB 1.1, it would be slow, but you could install that way.

To do that, you'll need to download the PloP Boot Manager (see http://www.plop.at), and boot it. PloP will activate the USB controller and allow you to boot the pendrive. Once F13 is running, install as usual.

[mlreta]

Thank you for the tip.

Finally, since the machine already had FC5, I did an "installation with no media", as stated in the Fedora documentation. It worked perfectly, except for the fact that it did not installed the graphical system (X11, Gnome, etc.). So I'm in the process of manual install of all those packages. When I'm finished with that, I'll see if it recognizes the CD drive or not.

Thank you all,

Mariano