Hello one and all.
I am trying to install SuSE 8.1 Pro on an HP Pavillion 8140. The machine is old (my friend bought it new in '96 or '97 I believe) and runs on a PII@200 MHz. I recently upgraded the memory to 64 Mb and I have a whopping 4 GB of disk.

I have tried several times to install SuSE 8.1 and I have yet to so so with success. I have found that to get the install to work properly I need to run in text mode and run the install program with "safe settings". I am trying to do a complete install (that is install the default packages including KDE and some of the office software).

The install process takes about 2 - 2.5 hours and when it is done (actually after it is 99% complete for a short while) I get a message that X of 350 packages returned errors, where X has been as low as 20 and as high as 350, but is usually in the 110-120 range.

After a couple of prompts ("do you want to look at log files...") a four line checklist appears to let me know what it is doing as the system prepares for initial boot. It copies some files, prepares the MBR and a couple of other steps that slip my mind at the moment. There is always an error message when copying to the Master Boot Record and sometimes a red box appears saying that there was a problem preparing the boot loader. The process dies right then and there, so I have to turn off the box and each time I get this far I hope and pray that the errors were misguided and that this time the system will boot. WRONG!!

I usually get the beginning of LILO (LI) and then lots of nothing. I always attempt to install 8.1 as a new installation which means that grub should be written to the MBR, not LILO. I should note that SuSE is replacing Red Hat 7.2 which did boot with LILO on this box. Any suggestions? I am anxious to get this loaded.

Feel free to ask me to fill in any blanks I may have created.

Might be a stupid thought, but I had kinda similar problems once, and it tured out that the cd was not good. The download of the iso was a few k off, and that threw the hole thing off. But if you are doing the suse ftp install, that wouldnt matter.... Then again if your not doing the ftp install, you could try that. It would at least test to see if your media is the problem. Just a thought, as I have spent many a hour in frustration, thanks to a bad cd.

Thank you stratocastor666. I fixed the problem last night. I bought 8.1 Pro and I was determined to get the install to work if I had to physically rearrange the bits on the cd myself. Along with the disk comes an admin and a user's guide. In the back of the user's guide there is an FAQ, but the questions were very basic issues, so I didn't pay much attention (oops).

One of the questions was "How do I uninstall Linux?" The answer included booting the system by Linux floppy, running fdisk to remove the partitions. Next boot with a DOS floppy and (this is the step that killed me) run fdisk /mbr. That overwrote the portion of the MBR that was forcing the system to use a now half installed (and hence not working) LILO at boot time.

After I ran fdisk /mbr in DOS mode I retried the install and BLAMO I have SuSE 8.1 Pro running at home. I can't wait to go play with it.

Again thanks for your help. The answer turned out to be a self-imposed RTFM. I knew if I took my problem public that the answer would make itself obvious to me.