Well here's the story:
My friend bought a websurfer for himself and I asked him to get me one. We started work on mine after school ended. In the beginning, I put in 64mb more of ram, making 80mb total. I also popped in a Promise EIDEMAXII ISA IDE controller and spliced the MB power cable to power my 15 gig Quantum IDE HD. I also hooked up an IDE atapi CD-ROM to it, and powered it through another computer.
Then I tried to install nt4..and the WS would not let me boot off CD. The Promise controller would recognize everything, including the CD-ROM, but refused to let me boot off *any* cd. I have already disabled on board ide in the bios, and set the boot order to CDROM, C. And yes, I have checked for a firmware update for the controller, and it doesn't exist. Because the controller card provides two IDE connector slots, it has the ability to control 4 IDE devices. I tried dozens of different configurations with my Promise controller. In the controller's bios I tried PNP, manual, and setting Master, Slave, etc. on different cables and in different orders and on different connector slots. Still no boot from CD.
After thinking it all over, I decided against using nt4. I decided to use linux mainly because it could do everything that I would need nt4 to do, and probably do it better.
So I moved on to linux. I burned a bootable Red Hat 6.2 "Zoot" CD from an iso that I downloaded from a random mirror site. (Keep in mind however, that I am still not able to boot off a CD, and I have doubts that I ever will.) I proceeded to format my 15 gig, sys it, and make it active. I loaded the CD-ROM drivers into it as well. After booting into the sys'd 15 gig, I was able to see the Red Hat CD. I then went into dosutils and ran autoboot.
The install went fine, except for one part where I accidentally hit 'NEXT' a few extra times more than necessary. This occured after I had chosen all the packages, and set all the different partitions for swap, /, and /home. The monitor settings and video card settings must have been skipped, among other settings that I assumed were trivial. However, the installation seemed to go fine, and when it finished I restarted the WS.
After the bios screen, the WS reported that there was a "Problem booting OS" or "Error booting OS" or something like that. What exactly does this mean? Is it possible that I missed some crucial install option at the end of the install wizard which may have fixed this problem??
I've searched and read every thread title and countless posts in the Websurfer Areas. I would **really** appreciate some help with this. Also, if anybody knows why I can't boot from CD, that would be really helpful too. Thanks.
