A friend of mine gave me his system and asked me to install linux on it. After a few false starts I found out that his RAM chip was bad. No problem, one new RAM chip and I was on my way.

I started off with Debian 3.0/testing and got a nice gnome environment set up with the exception of sound. When I went to recompile the kernel, the system crapped out with a segmentation fault. A bit odd but I figured it might be something specific to the testing distro and gcc.

I reformated and installed Debian again, this time staying at stable. Low and behold, the kernel still failed to compile. (I should note that I tried both the 2.4.20 and 2.4.22 kernel).

Next, I tried Gentoo, but it crapped out when chrooting. I got an illegal instruction error and could get no further.

As a last resort, i downloaded Mandrake 9.1. I figured it's reputation for easy installation would save me. Nope. It got to the 16 minutes to go mark before staying in place. I waited about 3 hours but it got no further.

Giving up, I went back and installed Windows 2000. That went off without a hitch. I'd love to blame this on hardware or the BIOS, but I can't see what could be causing the problem. I've tried different RAM, different Ethernet cards, etc and get the same results.

The only thing I can think of is that his previous OS (Windows XP Pro) did something to the computer BIOS which I don't know how to undo. Does anyone have an idea where I'm going wrong?!?

System is a Compaq Presario 7922 with Via 8501 board, 256MB RAM, 28GB Disk, and K6 processor.

TIA

My understanding is that Linux kernel compiles are a good system hardware stress test. Since you have tried swapping out memory, the next thing to suspect is your CPU. Is it overclocked? Can it be underclocked?

Good luck.