Newbie: Installation problems

[Sudhir P <sudhir.parasuram@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Please excuse me for the wide distribution. And do excuse me for not
being able to give the exact technical terms in the following. I have
tried to explain the situation to the best extent that I can (now).

My present set up:
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I have an i586 system in which I have dos, linux (Redhat and Debian)
installed (after lot of goof-ups and struggles, being a novice that I
am).

The partition details are as follows
/dev/hda1	- DOS
/dev/hda2 	- Linux partition (I suppose, I am not very confortable with
this naming
		  convention, so please excuse me)
/dev/hda5	- RedHat Linux (kernel - 2.0.36)
/dev/hda6	- Swap space (common to both Redhat and Debian)
/dev/hda7	- Debian Linux (kernel - 2.0.36)

The MBR contains the LILO. My lilo.conf in /dev/hda5 (Redhat) contains
details of the setup, and the details about Debian kernel (being present
in /dev/hda7, boot-label="debian"). I am assuming that this is where it
is taking information from when I type "debian" at my lilo prompt, the
kernel being loaded from /dev/hda7.

Dos (Windows-95) and Redhat are fully operational. There is some problem
with debian however.

I am not able to go beyond the base-kernel installation. I have
configured in the kernel to support cd-roms with the "common CD-ROMs"
option that is available for CD-ROM device drivers.

There is a part of the installation where u have to give details about
the "access" medium (default being /dev/cdrom). When I accept this as my
default or even type in "/dev/cdrom", it is reported as an error. It
says that it is unable to find the device (even though installation is
going on from the device).

If I go to another virtual-terminal and try: mount /dev/cdrom, 
it gives an error message stating that there is no entry in the
/etc/fstab. If I make an entry in the same, and issue "mount
/dev/cdroom", an error message stating that the kernel doesn't support
this filesystem (iso9660) is issued.

I am unable to go beyond this. No packages are being installed as I
haven't been able to specify /dev/cdrom as my source.

I hope that I have explained the situation clearly enough. In case you
require more details, please mail me.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Sudhir.P
-- 
When you hit rock bottom, there is no way, but, up.

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