I am having (a lot of) trouble installing RH8.0 on an old desktop (Pentium Pro, 9GB Maxtor HDD, 196MB RAM) which I want to use as an IMAP server.

I have been using the NFS network install from another machine connected to the target by a hub.

Everything proceeds swimmingly up to the bit where the file systems are prepared. A series of windows pops up saying "Formatting X file system...". The installation routine cycles through all the file systems I have selected until is gets to the last, /var. The progress bar gets to about 90% complete and then just hangs.

It doesn't make any difference how many partitions I use, whether they are physical, logical or LVMs, exactly the same thing happens. Also altering the size of the partitions makes no difference.

There is nothing wrong with the drive (AFAIK) which is much newer than the rest of the machine (which, in the same hardware configuration had previously run RH7.3 happily with absolutely no problems). I have further tested the HDD by putting it into a Win2K machine, formatting it and testing the drive with Norton Disk Doctor.

I hope I have posted this in the right place but I am a newbie to LinuxQuestions.org (but not to Linux, I've been using it daily since 1992).

Does anyone have any suggestions for me?

TIA

Simon

Not much of a clue of what's happening... I've read here at LQ similar failures (perform a search to see), anyway, did you tried to make disk preparation by hand ? or, you could issue at the console a "mkfs -t <fs_type> /dev/hdax" where hdax is the /var partition. That way you may see clearly what's going on.

I haven't tried to but I shall give this a go, thanks for the suggestion.

I just read elsewhere on LQ (I did have a look first before posting, but predictably I didn't find anything until after my post) that RH8.0 is picky about its minimum spec and clearly a Pentium Pro is pretty old now. However I cannot see any reason why it should fall over just because of that.

I'll check the minimum spec and then try creating the fs by hand.

Simon