When I use a Hard Drive Installation Method, select partition
/dev/sda9 from the list specified by the installation program, and specify
SL304 as the "Directory holding images" (that's where the SL*.iso files
are) the installation program complains "Device /dev/sda9 does not appear
to contain Red Hat CDROM images".  I hope someone can help figure out
what's wrong.  More details follow:

    When /dev/sda9 is mounted on /mnt/SL, a listing of /mnt/SL/SL304 shows

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 659838976 Feb 24 00:46 SL.304.021105.i386.disc1.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 672352256 Feb 24 05:23 SL.304.021105.i386.disc2.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 593227776 Feb 24 09:27 SL.304.021105.i386.disc3.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 500123648 Feb 24 12:54 SL.304.021105.i386.disc4.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root       252 Feb 24 12:54 SL.304.021105.i386.md5sum

    The .iso files can be mounted with -o loop, and they do appear to be
images of installation CDROMs.  `md5sum -c SL.304.021105.i386.md5sum`
shows them all to be "OK".  I was able to burn CD's with them, the CD's
passed the media check, and I used them to install SL3.0.4.  But I may
want to install on a network of many computers without good communication
to the outside world, and would prefer installing from CDROM images on
disk rather than from CDROMs on each computer.
    A probably irrelevant complication is that I tried disk installation
without booting from a floppy by putting in grub.conf

title Install SL 304 (/ is /dev/sda11)
    root (hd0,10)
    kernel /tmp/304/vmlinuz
    initrd /tmp/304/initrd.img

where vmlinuz and initrd.img come from the isolinux directory on
SL.304.021105.i386.disc1.iso.  I think this atypical way of booting into
installation is not the cause of the problem since using it does give
the installation dialog up to where it failed to recognize the .iso
images.  Furthermore, when I tried a network install of SL3.0.4 on a
second computer with the same images on a third computer, and booted with
a bootdisk.img floppy copied from the SL.304.021105.i386.disc1.iso, I
eventually got "That directory does not seem to contain a Scientific Linux
Installation tree".  Pointing to a set of RH9 .iso files in a neighboring
directory on the same computer did seem to find an installation tree,
though the installation failed with the valid complaint "The Scientific
Linux Installation tree in that directory does not seem to match your boot
media".  So it looks as if the SL*.iso files are not considered
installation images by the installation program.


Steven Yellin