I need some help/advice. I have a win 2k box that I want to wipe out and install RH 9.0 over(no dual boot). Problem is I can't figure out how to do it. I think I need to remove the win 2k but I'm just not sure anyone got adivce or a solution.

Since windows and Linux are different OS's, you can't install Linux to the partition until you format it for Linux, which will definitely wipe out any remains of windows. You should be able to do it from the RH install cd. It should detect the win partition, and ask you if you want to reformat for Linux.

Note: you should divide it into a minimum of two partitions. One equal to 1 or 2 times the amount of ram on you system (for the linux-swap partition), and the rest for Linux. Of course, you can make several partitions for Linux, and mount different parts of the OS to their own partitions.

unfortuanly I can't start the red hat cd when rebooting. The only cd I can start up from cd is win 2k. That's why I think I have to completly remove the os so that I can run RH from cd.

Just because you are using Win 2K does not mean that the only cd that will boot when you turn on your computer is the Win 2K cd. Is this an official RH 9 cd or did you download the ISO and burn it to a cd? If you downloaded and burnt it as an ISO, then you may have burn it wrong. Do you have any other bootable cd's that you can try to see if they work?

This is an actually bought cd straight from RedHat. It will not boot. I place it in cd tray in windows then reboot the system. The system will not try to boot from the disk and will continue to bring up win2k. But if I put the win2k cd in it will try to boot up. Thank you for the help. I have used this same cd on clean straight from the factory servers and it works fine. Is there anything I can do to force it to boot from the cd.

What you can try to do is leave all of the other boot options off (harddrive, other cd-roms/dvd-roms and floppy disk) and just leave the cd-rom as the first option and leave the other boot options off. I have not tried this myself, but I have seen other people suggest it, so I dont know if it will work or not. Its worth a try though.

Also, if that does not work, do you have another cd-rom drive installed? You could try to boot with that drive instead and see if it does the same thing.

Do you where the boot control is for win2k. Just asking.

You must set CD booting first in the BIOS. Your current settings are HD boot first, which then goes into windows. It is very easy to do--just press F8 or Del--whatever the screen displays on boot. Also, you don't need as much swap space as mentioned. 200 MB should be fine, unless you have below 64MB sys ram or something. Good luck.

unfortunaly that is not an option in win2k when I push f8. Is there another area to do this that you know of.

this has nothing to do with win2k or any other OS. This is for bios changes. You will probably see something like "Press Del to Enter Setup" (or whatever key it is) right after you turn on your computer. Once entering setup set your CD drive first in the boot sequence.

I'll take a look

It worked. I pressed delete during the initial boot and I got the bios. It never said on the screen to push delete but I tried and it worked. Thanks for the help. A whole lot of time and frustration could have been avoided if I just started here first.

lol