Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Davicom Tulip NIC, ISOLinux 3.75, and Fedora 12 Install

If you have a Dell Dimension desktop from around the 2002-2003 era, you may have a network card with a Davicom Tulip chipset, possible the CNet Pro200WL PCI Fast (10/100 Mbps) Ethernet controller.  On the back metal panel, it will say “CNet” on the back.  When you try to boot to a Fedora 12 or Centos 5.x installer CD/DVD, you will get a message that says “Plug and Play Error”.  The installer will then continue to a certain point, but will never completely install.  Even with the complete Fedora 12 installer DVD, the installer will think that it will have to go out to the network to retrieve all of the installation packages.

This error is further described here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=446469

My solution: replace the NIC with another NIC, and the Fedora 12 installation was able to successfully complete, with the complete Fedora 12 installer DVD.  It might have also been possible to remove the Davicom NIC and not have a network card at all, and then still be able to install Fedora 12 off of the DVD.  Here’s the irony: the Davicom network card was causing problems in the Fedora 12 installer which made the installer incorrectly think it had to use that very same card to download the installation packages.  Maybe the NIC was just causing problems because it wanted attention.

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