[ale] USB DVD seen by bios but not RHEL5

[Jeff Lightner]

Is there any command line option I can give at the boot: prompt (e.g.
linux noapic...) or any driver I can tell it to use for this?

I'm trying to install a Dell PowerEdge 860 that has an internal CD
drive.

In order to speed up installation I wanted to do it with a DVD instead
and happened to have a USB DVD drive (also made by Dell for our blade
server).  

I attached the USB DVD drive and booted the system.   The BIOS finds the
drive just fine and takes me to the RHEL5 boot: prompt.  It continues
asking for keyboard type, language etc...

It then loads the ramdisk, drivers etc... but when it gets to the point
of checking for installation media it says none found.   At the point it
says that it ejects the internal CD drive (even though nothing is there)
but does not eject the DVD drive.   This makes it seem the Linux kernel
isn't seeing the USB DRIVE.

I'd had a similar issue with an old Dell 1300 CD drive a long time back.
i.e. BIOS would boot from the CD fine but Fedora wouldn't recognize that
there was a CD when it loaded ramdisk etc...  The fix for that was to
type "ide=nodma".   I'm hoping there is some option like this or some
driver available that I have to explicitly tell it to use and that
someone can give me a pointer as to what that might be.

Of course it may be it is simply confused by having both a CD and a DVD
drive.  Disabling the CD in BIOS didn't help.  I don't really think it's
a BIOS setting anyway since it does boot the DVD - it is only the Linux
(RHEL5) that is puking on having no media present.

During the RHEL5 start up I do see it load the USB-STORAGE driver along
with MPTBASE, MPTSAS & ATA-PIIX.   (The MPT stuff is the built in SAS
for the disk drives.)
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