Red Hat 4.0 Install Problem

[jbr at star.net (Barry Ryan)]

At 11:33 PM 1/16/97 -0500, John Abreau wrote:
> ........
>> I go through the complete procedure and steps again.  Install gets to about
>> the same point, and guess what.  REBOOT. 
> .........
>
>You mention running LOADLIN and booting DOS a couple times. After you did
>that, did you shut down the machine completely and power it off and on
before >booting the RedHat install floppy? Or did you just CTRL-ALT-DEL? 

No John!  When I first installed RED HAT, I did it on the Hard Disk Drive,
which had a minimum partition for DOS on it about 60 Meg, the rest (350
Meg) was free - not partitioned.  I made the RED HAT Boot (IMAGE) Disk, and
installed Linux, did LOGIN to root, snooped around a bit, did the CONFIGURE
so that it at loadlin I could type in LINUX or it would default to MS/DOS,
and that all worked fine. 

My intentions are to make that a complete stand alone LINUX only machine,
and network it into my WIN-95 and WIN-NT (3.51) terminals at home.  So I
booted the system with Linux, went to root, did FDISK and removed the Linux
partitions.  Then loaded MS/Dos, and also ran FDISK to remove the DOS
partition too!  Booted then from floppy disk (MS/Dos) and there wasn't
anything there at C: (hda) at all, great just what I was looking for.  

I got out the RED HAD Boot Disk, and the RED HAT CD#1.  Placed it in the
machine, and turned it on.  Partitioned hda (428 Meg/899 cylinders): hda1
(Linux 83/ 1-750), hda2 (Linux 82/swap 751-779), and hda3 (Linux 83/usr
800-899).  Did format and bad sector checking, activated swap on hda2
(approximately 19 Meg), selected the packages to install, and then started
the install.  While the RED HAT Install shell is running, all goes well up
until about 90-95% of the way through, then all of a sudden "IT" (RED HAT
Install Shell) just restarts the computer.  Now remember this is just LINUX
on this system.  

When the computer restarts, it goes back into the RED HAD Install program,
and asks, "Do you have a color monitor, YES/NO!" and then just sits there
and waits for a response like it did when it was first run.  That is
because the RED HAT Boot Disk is still in fd0 (A:).  So I ran through this
again, and the same thing happened.  I then decided to shut off the
computer, make a new boot disk, and try it again.  Well I did, and it did
too!  Same results.

So then I tried Slackware using kernel 1.2.13 and it loaded Ok.  I also got
to DOOM demo, didn't try XWin configure though.  Didn't want to waste the
time on it for now.  I had FDISK'ed the same as I defined above for RED
HAT.  So then I went and wiped everything out.  To make sure all was clear
I reformatted hda with MS/Dos completely, then wiped it out using FDISK.

		----> Original post/message sent <----

(Wednesday & Thursday nights)
Tried RED HAT again with making the hda just completely LINUX, and the same
thing happened again.  So I said Ok, I'll make a small MS/Dos partition on
hda, and then try RED HAT again.  Well this time it didn't work, it did the
same thing, just got near the end and rebooted the system.  I turned it
off, and decided to try it again.  Same results.  

(Friday)
Tonight I am going to try and use the RED HAT 2.1 that came with the Nov 95
INFO-MAGIC 5-CD set that I have.  If I can install that A-Ok, then I'll use
the RED HAT version for, and just try and upgrade to see what happens.

I'll keep you posted to the outcome, as the saga continues.  As they say,
it is one of the best ways to learn.

>When you do a CTRL-ALT-DEL (or press the RESET switch), DOS is left in 
>memory, and this can interfere with Linux in strange ways. That would be
>my first guess as to what your problem might be.

See my above comments, they are a little more descriptive than my original
post on the steps actually undertaken, plus added updates of what has
transpired since original post.

					Take care,
					    Barry...


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