Hi, I'm sort of a n00b with linux, so excuse me if this is a totally stupid question. I'm trying to install Linux on a separate HD (slave... I have XP on the master) and I'm pretty sure I have the BIOS page as it needs to be... Boot order is Floppy, DVD+RW, then Hard Drive. So I reboot with the installation disk (Red Hat Enterprise Linux... But I've also tried SuSE, Slackware, Vector Linux, DSL, and Mandrake with almost the exact same problem) and the Welcome page loads. As soon as I press enter to begin installation, I get this

vmlinuz...........
initrd.img...........................

and then the PC resets itself. I am eventually taken back the the Welcome page. I have tried several different installation parameters:

linux text
linux noprobe
linux mediacheck
linux skipddc
linux <options>

all with the exact same results. I have no idea what the problem is. Is it possible that my hardware is rejecting linux in some way... and if so how can this be fixed. Please Help... I've been trying to migrate to Linux for quite some time now and this is pretty frustrating. Thanks.

Hi, and welcome to LQ!

Can you please provide a bit more detail about the machine?
Motheboard, CPU, RAM? Are you overclocking?



Cheers,
Tink

ahh... I knew this was coming...

It's an HP Pavilion with Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.80GHz, 504 MB RAM
The Drive I'm installing from is a NEC DVD+RW ND-2100AD

I don't know if that's everything you need... let me know if you need something more specific.

It definetely seems to be something hardware configuration related. I'm guessing that it has something to do with when it initializes the ram drive. I would take a look to see if there is any information regarding ram drives with installation on the site.