[conspire] need assistance installing Fedora-10 on laptop from ISO on external hard drive

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):

> I should have downloaded and burned the 6 discs. I'm doing that now. I
> guess I have a least 6 hours to download, then verify, burn, install.

Well, I hope you have a fast connection!  ;->

> However, I still want to know how to get to the boot prompt on my
> laptop and desktop. What key do I hit and when?  argh!

Er, when you say "how to get the boot prompt", do you mean "how to boot
from the boot device of my choosing"?  If you end up burning the 6 
ISOs to CD, then logically you'll want to figure out how you tell your 
laptop "Please boot from the CD drive" at the end of Power-On Self-Test 
(POST).

On many Pee-Cee machines, the F12 key permits selecting a boot device.
Or F9, or some other key:  It all depends on the BIOS.  With older BIOSes,
sometimes there's no such option for _one-time_ selection of boot
device, and you have to enter BIOS Setup to _change_ the boot device to
CD (or rather, put it above HD in the list of devices to try), and have
to remember to put the boot device list back when you're all done.

> Another question, I have two external hard drives connected via firewire. I
> had chained them from my desktop. I wanted to rsync my laptop before
> installing and had to play around before I could finally see my 400G drive
> from my laptop. Then I could no longer access the 400G drive from my
> desktop. Am I doing something wrong, should I be able to see the 400G drive
> from both my laptop and desktop computers.

I don't have sufficient data to know why you lost access to the 400 GB
drive, sorry.  If it's what you're asking:  I know of no reason why you 
should not be able to daisy-chain two drives.  Inability to reliably do
so is an indication something's slightly wrong.

I've _personally_ never hung more than one Firewire device off a
Firewire HBA (host bus adapter) -- and only rarely that much.