I am installing RH 7.1 in my Gateway 2000 P5-90 with 40MB RAM. I have installed RH 6.2 and 7.0 without any problems. The specific problem is that when I use the boot disk (motherboard doesn't support cd-rom boot) the hard disk and cd-rom drives don't get detected. Trying to solve the problem I used the RH 7.0 boot disk with the RH 7.1 cd, it installed correctly and it boots until it starts probing the IDE devices and gets stuck and gives a kernel panic error.

Any ideas?

Thanks

just a remark, it would help to post ure hardware configuration and if u know it, the modules that where needed under earlier versions of red hat.
my ESP is buggy and I still can't smell hardware :-]

I have an Intel Pentium 90MHz, NEC CD-ROM DRIVE (CDR-260) as hdb, 40MB RAM, Western Digital 2.1 MB HD as hda. How can I know what modules the older versions used?
I also tried passing the "hdb=cdrom" parameter with no luck.

weird it works in 7.0 and not with 7.1. even tho the P5-90 is relatively old (siz years I think?).
your CDR is non-ATAPI, I think with a recompile of the kernel u can add it, but Im not sure about that.
the Gateway 2000 P5-90 motherboard possibly has buggy RZ-1000 and/or CMD640 EIDE chips. I know with a kernel recompile can add support for it.

Ive looked around, but found no other clues than adding "hda=serialize" at the bootprompt.
It isnt the most pretty option but if no one has a definitive answer I would suggest installing 7.0 again and upgrade over that.