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Starting the Installation Program

3.2 Starting the Installation Program

Now it's time to start installing Red Hat Linux. To start the installation, it is first necessary to boot the installation program. Before we start, please make sure you have all the resources you'll need for the installation. If you've already read through Chapter 2, and followed the instructions, you should be ready.

[Alpha Systems: If you haven't created your diskettes yet, please refer to the first chapter of the Red Hat Linux Alpha Installation Addendum, and create them now. After you've created the necessary diskettes, please finish reading the first chapter of the Red Hat Linux Alpha Installation Addendum for information on starting the installation.]

[SPARC Systems: If you haven't prepared for the installation yet, please read Sections F.2 through F.5. Determine how you will boot the installation program, and issue the boot command that will start the installation.]

3.2.1 Booting the Installation Program

To start installing Red Hat Linux, insert the boot diskette into your computer's first diskette drive and reboot (or boot from the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM, if your computer supports it). Your BIOS settings may need to be changed to allow you to boot from the diskette or CD-ROM.

After a short delay, a screen containing the boot: prompt should appear. The screen contains information on a variety of boot options. Each boot option also has one or more help screens associated with it. To access a given help screen, press the appropriate function key as listed in the line at the bottom of the screen.

You should keep two things in mind:

Normally, you'll only need to press [Enter] to boot. Watch the boot messages to see whether the Linux kernel detects your hardware. If it does not properly detect your hardware, you may need to restart the installation in ``expert'' mode. Expert mode disables most hardware probing, and gives you the option of entering options for the drivers loaded during the installation. Expert mode can be entered using the following boot command:

boot: expert

Please Note: The initial boot messages will not contain any references to SCSI or network cards. These devices are supported by modules that are loaded during the installation process.

Options can also be passed to the kernel. For example, to instruct the kernel to use all the RAM in a 128 MB system, enter:

boot: linux mem=128M

However, with most computers, there is no need to pass this argument to the kernel. The kernel will detect the amount of memory your system has in most cases. To be sure that all of your memory has been detected, at a shell prompt type:

cat /proc/meminfo 

This will display the amount of memory detected by the kernel in the form of total, used, free, etc.

If MemTotal is not correct for your system, you will need to modify your lilo.conf to pass that amount of memory to the kernel at boot time. Such as, if your computer has 96 megabytes of RAM, you will add:

append="mem=96M"

After entering any options, press [Enter] to boot using those options. If you do need to specify boot options to identify your hardware, please make note of them -- they will be needed later.

[Intel Systems: Installing Without Using a Boot Diskette The Red Hat Linux/Intel CD-ROM can also be booted by newer computers that support bootable CD-ROMs. Not all computers support this feature, so if yours can't boot from the CD-ROM, there is one other way to start the installation without using a boot diskette. The following method is specific to Intel-based computers only.]

If you have MS-DOS installed on your computer, you can boot the installation system directly from the CD without using any diskettes.

To do this (assuming your CD is drive d:),, use the following commands:

C:\> d:
D:\> cd \dosutils
D:\dosutils> autoboot.bat

Note that this method will not work if run in a DOS window -- the autoboot.bat file must be executed with DOS as the only operating system. In other words, Windows cannot be running.

If your computer can't boot directly from CD-ROM (and you can't use a DOS-based autoboot), you'll have to use a boot diskette to get things started.


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