I'm trying to install a new server for our company. We've got a basic bare-bones P4 machine, with 1 WD 80 gig hard drive for the boot/swap/root drive, and 2 Seagate 300 gig hard drives for a simple RAID1 installation.

The problem that I'm having, every time the graphical OS install gets to formatting the raid drive, it locks up about halfway through.

I've already swapped the position of every drive, changed busses, basically installed all 3 hard drives and the CD drive in every order imaginable. I've installed the OS without using a RAID1, and using each drive as an individual entity, and it works fine. I've already replaced one of the drives, thinking it was faulty. I've even gone so far as to have the entire computer itself replaced. The same exact problem is coming up every time. The only thing that I have not changed, that I can think of, is the CD's.

The kicker is....when we first received this computer, we received another that was identical. It installed perfectly fine, and has been running for a week already with no issues.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

--J

Some questions.

1. What distribution of Linux are you trying to install?
   (i.e. Fedora or RedHat or SuSE etc.)
2. If the install is locking up, is the light on the CD drive keep on blinking or does it stop reading the drive?
3. Are you able to do a soft reboot (ctrl+alt+del) during the install or are you forced to do a hard reboot?