[ale] Mandrake 'bugs?'

[Gary Maltzen]

>I have two cd drives in my testbed system, a slow (8x) CD-R/W as secondary
>master (hdc) and a fast (45x) CD-ROM as secondary slave (hdd).  Obviously, I
>want to do my install off of hdd.  All the *BSDs, Debian and derivatives,
>various other Linux distributions that I've tried, and Solaris all support
>doing that.  They ask you which drive you'd like to install off of, and take
>it from there.  RH and its copies don't do that.  You can (kinda) work
>around it if you know what you're doing by telling the kernel to ignore hdc,
>in which case RH will obviously install off of hdd, but my BIOS doesn't boot
>off of secondary slave CD drives, so that's not ideal....

Hmm, on one of my systems I have a very similar configuration. On the secondary controller I have a CD-RW and a 5-disk changer.

Installation (NT) was dead slow booting from the CD-RW and, IIRC, my BIOS only boots off the first CD-drive.

In addition to the boot-from-CDROM issue, I had difficulty getting Adaptec's EasyCD to work when I had the CD-RW as master and the changer as slave. I've since reversed roles and everyone's happy. I've even nearly installed OpenLinux 2.2 using the Lizard (except for X lockups) on the back half of the (2GB) master drive (slave is 16.7GB).

If your BIOS doesn't boot off secondary slave CD drives, why not just switch the two CD drives' roles?