My Red Hat 8.0 does not like my PC

[Richard Craneum]

I posted before that I had problems installing RH8.0 and I made it work by installing 7.2 and upgrade to 8.0 I tried to do an install with a new set of CDs and I got the same problem. I took the same CDs and loaded on a Compaq Deskpro 4000 with 733MHz and it worked! All the hardware is different so, my question is... Does anybody have an idea what could be? I am using an ECS K7S5A v3.x with a AMD 1600 xp and 4GB HDD, brain storming is highly appreciated.

[jetblackz]

Is it a AMD CPU? Try passing

mem=nopentium

at bootup. Or you could list your specs.

[retoon]

I've been posting alot of this lately, but how much ram do you have in this machine? Is your video shared? Who makes your video card? How many packages are you trying to install? Need more system info. It shouldn't matter that you're using an amd processor. im running red Hat 8, and it required no such tweaking. Probably not the case, but it might not have the drivers for your chipset. Also, if you are using 128mb of ram, and your video is shared ram, you either will not get the installation to work correctly, or it will install and move like molasses. For a full install, Red Hat requires about 4.25 gigabytes of hard drive space. Is it booting from the cd? If so, where during the install does it lockup, or simply not install? More info will help us to assist you more efficiently.

[Richard Craneum]

O/S(s): Mandrake 9.0, W2K sp2 and RH8.0 (if I can)
Removable HDD (4GB, 6GB,4GB)
Slave drive with 6GB
Mobo: ECS K7S5A ver 3.x
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (non OCed)
RAM: 128 DDR PC2100 (genreic from Tigerdirect)
Video: NVIDIA TNT2 Rage Pro 16MB
Ethernet: Embeded NIC
Sound: Embeded Audio
Other: Generic PSU, Generic HSF, Generic CDRW, Compaq keyboard, Samtron 77V monitor and Harman Kardon cheap "mule" powered speakers.

The system (off the shelf parts) for around $350.00 w/o the monitor.


OS loaded before. Peanut 9.4, Slackware, Mandrake 9.0, Red Hat 7.2, W2K Pro.

[je_fro]

What do you mean by, "It doesn't work."

[Richard Craneum]

I just bought a book called "Red Hat Linux 8.0 Bible" by Christopher Negus. It came with 3 CDs with Red Hat 8.0 OS in them. I am trying to load it on my PC which runs with removables drives, one drive with W2K the other with Mandrake 9.0 Both works fine. I am using a different HDD 4GB Maxtor to load Red Hat on it. I get the GUI, I apply the choices, reformat the drive, does all it hoops... root password, users and so on. After the 2nd disk, right at the very end at 100% completion when is about to make final entries to the bootloader, "Disaster"! Shows a countdown from 4 to 0 or some like that and an error that says that a font was unable to load. States that is ok to reboot the PC, once after POST and start to boot I get a screenfull of 80s or some other combination of numbers. I reset it, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, off and on button. Re-install it and still the same... What could be!

I thought the media was bad so I got new CDs at no charge, same problem though!
Is like the setup does not write to GRUB or LiLo the final imputs to make the HDD to boot. So I end up with out a boot floppy or boot HDD


If I load RH7.2 and do an upgrade to to RH8.0 it will work. I thought the CDs were bad, tried on a Compaq, 96MB RAM, 20GB HDD, and a Pentium III 733MHz and it worked!

[retoon]

When you went to set up the bootloader, did you set it in the MBR? Which bootloader are you using? If you're using the default bootloader, it is grub. Try using Lilo. I assume since you said right after the post you get a bunch of 80s, you do not get the bootloader option?

[TigerOC]

80's error means that it does not recognise the boot process. You should be able to use the rescue resource on the first cd by auto booting from the CD

[neondog]

When push comes to shove do not do a graphical install and use the low-res and no frame buffers option. I got RH 8 to run on a 166 mhz HP box that way. You still get all the options you would as in a graphic install but its not as pretty and get ready to use the tab button and spacebar. If all goes well it will seem just the same once up and running.

[Richard Craneum]

I tried both... LiLo and GRUB. Red Hat 7.2 loads perfect and upgrades to to 8.0 But that is the only way that you can load 8.0 I want to start with a clean slate by installing 8.0 from scratch instead of upgrading from 7.2 Other Distros... No problem!

When the install is about done and halts the system, you can get to the shell and see the directories on the drive. Reboot the system and you can see sometimes, GRUB or LiLo showing that no OS is there, this is not always the case sometimes you get to see it or get the numbers...

I might try a different drive and see what it does. Perhaps is going to sleep during install on the same spot!!! One thing I noticed and is the install it takes a bit longer than 7.2