Starting the Installation Program

The following methods can be used to start the installation:

Insert the diskette included in your boxed set (or a network boot disk, or PCMCIA boot disks, that you have created) into the primary diskette drive and reboot your computer.
Insert the Red Hat Linux CD 1 into the drive and reboot, if your computer can boot from the CD-ROM drive.
Boot MS-DOS, and start a program in the dosutils directory of the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM named autoboot.bat (this will work from DOS only; it will not work in a DOS window started from within Windows).

While the installation program loads, messages will scroll on your screen. When the installation program has loaded, this prompt appears:

boot:

Text Mode Boot Options

If you press [Enter] at the boot: prompt, or if you take no action within the first minute after the boot: prompt appears, the graphical installation program will start. Pressing one of the help screen function keys as described above disables this autostart feature.

To start the text mode installation program, before pressing [Enter], type:

boot: text

If the installation program does not properly detect your hardware, you may need to restart the installation in "expert" mode. To start an expert mode installation, type:

boot: text expert

Expert mode disables most hardware probing, and gives you the option of entering options for the drivers loaded during the installation.

	Note
	The initial boot messages will not contain any references to SCSI or network cards. This is normal; these devices are supported by modules that are loaded during the installation process.

Note that the command to start a serial installation has changed. If you must perform the installation in serial mode, use the following command:

boot: linux text console=<device>

In this command, <device> should be the device you are using (such as ttyS0 or ttyS1).

You can also pass options to the kernel as you are booting the installation program. For example, to instruct the kernel to use all the RAM in a 128 MB system, enter:

boot: linux text mem=128M

To explicitly request a dialog where you can configure additional devices (such as ISA devices) include the isa directive:

boot: linux text isa

Displaying Online Help

Once the installation program is loaded into memory, you can obtain information about the installation process and options by pressing [F1] through [F6]. For example, press [F2] to see general information about the online help screens.