HowTo do a fresh e-smith 4.12 install on an ASUS A7V133 ATA100 board using the Promise ATA100 controller with a single ATA100 drive . This is How I did it. Your mileage may vary. Note: My ATA100 Drive is the Master single drive on the Primary ATA100 port and my CDROM is the Master on the Standard controller. Make a floppy Boot Disk from CD Rom Image using rawrite dos command from your windows or workstation machine. The rawrite dos program can be found in the \dosutils directory on the e-smith iso image cd. Copy the rawrite.exe file to your windows or workstations machine and click on it to run. When the prompt ask the location of the image file to write enter the path to your cdrom images directory on the e-smith cd. Ie: d:\images\boot.img It will then ask you for the destination floppy drive (Choose your floppy drive letter) and enter return. This will write the e-smith boot image to your floppy drive. Place this newly created boot disk in the floppy drive and the e-smith cdrom in the cdrom drive of the machine you are installing e-smith on. Now start up the computer you are installing e-smith on. When you get to the boot prompt asking you to type accept to continue the Install type ALT-F2 and you will get a shell prompt ending with a # sign. At the shell prompt type in /cat/proc/pci this will give you a lot of information about your devices. Look for something like this: Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology Unknown device (rev 2). Vendor id=105a. Device id=d30. Medium devsel. IRQ 10. Master Capable. Latency=32. I/O at 0xa000 [0xa001]. I/O at 0x9800 [0x9801]. I/O at 0x9400 [0x9401]. I/O at 0x9000 [0x9001]. I/O at 0x8800 [0x8801]. Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe1000000 [0xe1000000]. Next write down the values on those lines beginning with I/O, call them a, b, c, d (which in my case above is 0xa000, 0x9800, 0x9400, 0x9000). Ignore "e" (0x8801). ) Now type ALT-F1 to get back to the e-smith install screen where it says boot: and you must type accept to continue. INSTEAD of just typing accept and hitting return. Give the following command line argument to the boot: accept prompt accept ide2=a,b+2 ide3=c,d+2 (Notice that you are adding 2 to the second and fourth IO addresses) Which in my case is: accept ide2=oxa000,0x9802 ide3=0x9400,0x9002 Then hit return and your install should find your ATA100 drive controller and disk and start the install. After the install you will be asked to reboot the computer. Be sure you leave the boot disk you made in the drive and you are booting from it. On the boot you will be presented with a prompt that looks like this: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- LILO Press (or wait 10seconds) to boot your Red Hat linux system from /dev/hde6. You may override The default linux kernel parameters by typing "linux ", followed by if you like. boot: as soon as you see the above type in your parameters again EXCEPT THIS TIME lead with the word linux NOT accept as you did before so the line would look like this: boot: linux ide2=a,b+2 ide3=c,d+2 or in my case boot: linux ide2=oxa000,0x9802 ide3=0x9400,0x9002 Note: You must be fast in typing the first Character of the word linux to pause the boot process. Don't worry if it starts to boot, it will try but it will not be able to find your drive and you will see a line That says: kernel panic. If this happens just control-Alt-Delete and reboot and be a little faster next time. This should now boot you up for the first time and you will get the e-smith configuration screen. Go ahead and configure your system. After finishing the configuration you will again be asked to reboot to finalize all your settings. Again, be sure your still booting off the floppy. On the reboot you will again be presented with the LILO boot prompt as above and ONE more time you will have to type in the: boot: linux ide2=a,b+2 ide3=c,d+2 (with your values again of course) line as you did before. Now your system will be booted up to the Pretty Red ADMIN screen or the login prompt depending on what you choose during configuration. NOW you don't want to have to always enter this funny string every time you boot up the machine, So Now that you are at the ADMIN screen or login prompt, Either login in as root if you are at the prompt or hit ALT-F2 if you have the red admin screen in front of you to get a login prompt then login in as root using the password you choose during the configuration After you have logged in, type "pico /etc/lilo.conf" (without the quotes of course) to edit the bootup configuration file. Here is what my /etc/lilo.conf looked like: ----------begin /etc/lilo.conf------------- boot=/dev/hde map=/boot/map install=/boot/boot.b prompt timeout=50 message=/boot/e-smith.pcx linear default=esmith image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.16-22 ---------- end /etc/lilo.conf------------- Now that pico has the file open go down just below the last line of the file and type in the following That you have done so many times before EXCEPT you will need to use the (quote marks as written to get pico to append the line, type: append="ide2=oxa000,0x9802 ide3=0x9400,0x9002" Remember to use your OWN values and this time include them in quotes. After you change the file, hit "Ctrl-O" to save it, then "Ctrl-X" to quit the editor. Now type "lilo" (wihout the quotes) to save the settings to the boot sector of your hard drive. Now you are done. If all went well you can now remove the boot disk and the next time you have to reboot it will boot from the hard drive as normal and no more putting in all those strings. Don't forget to log out by typing exit at the prompt. You can hit ALT-F1 to get back to your admin screen if you have selected that configuration. Some additional notes here. I am new to linux and e-smith and all of the above information was gathered from various sources and sites around the net. Please do not ask me WHY you do this as I can only report on what I had to do to get e-smith to run on a fresh install on My ASUS A7V133 Board with the built in Promise ATA100 controller. One additional note while setting up this machine. I found it very hard to walk in to my local CompUSA and buy a CHEAP 100MB NIC card. After making TWO trips and buying a Linksys and Dlink card that would not work with any of the e-smith supplied drivers I was forced to buy the HIGHLY touted 3Com cards. I purchased the 3C905C-TX-M at $99.95 and the more competitively priced 3CSOHO100-TX $39.95 (Marketed toward the Home/Small Office User) I am happy to report the CHEAPER $39.95 3CSOHO100-TX card works just fine with e-smith. E-smith does not recognize the card on boot so you do have to install the driver 3c90x from the configure server screen. Good Luck and Happy e-smith’ing Dan Turner Wa4bro_at_bellsouth.net