Cannot boot SUSE Linux 10.0 install CD on new Dimension 9150

Question

My Dimension 9150 will not boot from the Linux installation CD. The CD seems to be completey ignored, as the system simply proceeds through the usual Windows XP boot cycle. I have verified the following: 1. The CD is good. I can read its contents fine from XP, and I can boot my other machines into the Linux installation tool using this same CD. 2. I modified the BIOS boot sequence to look to the CD first for a boot image, but it is still ignored. 3. If I disable the hard drive in the BIOS boot sequence to force booting from CD, I get the classic error about striking F1 for reboot or F2 for setup utility. 4. SUSE provides a secondary installation CD with what they call a 'conventional 2.88 MB boot image'. Not sure what that is, or what is 'unconventional' about the primary CD, but that secondary boot CD is not recognized on boot either.   My Dimension 9150 is less than two weeks old, and is running bios 'DXP051 Rev. A02'. It does have a SATA hard drive, but I've read in other postings that Linux kernel 2.6.11 and beyond should handle those drives just fine (SUSE 10.0 retail box ships with 2.6.13). Besides, I am not sure that the installation is even getting that far -- it seems to be more related to the CDROM than it does the hard drive. Does anyone know what's different about this machine that would lead to this behavior, or maybe point me in the direction of what I am missing? Thank you for any advice!

micmaxe · Answer

Have you tried using F12 for the boot menu when F2 = Setup, F12 = Boot Menu appears in the upper-right corner of the screen?

pingus · Answer

Hi,

I've successfully installed the box version of SUSE 10 using the 32/64bit DVD. The only thing that doesn't work out of the box was the LAN-Adapter, but you can find an updated driver on the Intel site (see e1000-6.3.9.tar.gz).

I've also activated the bootable flag for the DVD-drives in the BIOS.

Pingus

volcano_son · Answer

All - Thanks for the replies. I did eventually resolve this issue, in part with advice from other postings about SATA drives. There were two causes of my problem:
1. As suggested in postings re: SATA drives, I changed the BIOS setting to Combination, to support both PATA and SATA. It was originally SATA-only.
2. The boot order in the BIOS was set (correctly) to CD/floppy/HD. My machine has no floppy, but it does have a DVD player in addition to the CD. I had originally tried booting from the DVD, but it didn't work -- now I know it was because of issue #1, but at the time, I thought it was because I saw in the BIOS that booting from DVD was not provided as an option. So I continued trying to boot from CD, even after making the change in #1 above. I eventually noticed that the DVD was configured as the PCI master. When I tried the DVD installation disk again, the install worked flawlessly.

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