I attempted to install scientific Linux the other day. I started up my system and everything went smoothly through the test of the cd's, and when I went to continue, the set up terminated and now I can't even get to the set up. My computer is still set up to boot off of the cd-rom, but it only spins the disk, does nothing, and continues and boots up windows XP. I have no idea why my computer will no longer boot off the disks and am wondering how to fix this or why this is. For any help anyone can give, Thank you kindly.

have you installed linux properly ??? have you got successful install confirmation ??


If grub is not installed properly , then you may not able to boot linux.

if you install windows XP, after linux installation then grub will erased. then you can only boot windows.

for re installation of "GRUB" you have to repair your linux grub.

never got to the installation process, so no it wasn't even ever installed. First time through I got through the test of the 2 installation cd's, once it got done, I hit continue and the set up was terminated for some reason. Now I can't get to the set up at all, it's like the computer doesn't think the disk is bootable off of.

seems to be your disk has problem. take a proper live CD/DVD and install linux.

Try...

Try setting the BIOS back to booting from the HDD as the First Boot Device and boot Windows. Thereafter, shut down the system, restart and set the BIOS to CD-ROM as First Boot Device, boot Windows and shut down. Then try with your live-cd.

Have you tried any other live-cd and was there any difference?

I will try that, I haven't tried another OS system except a duplicate copy of the one that wont work. The drive does read music cd's fine though.

I tried resetting the order a few times, downloaded a new image and burned a new disc, and still not getting anything different. I have no clue whats wrong with my system. Any further help is greatly appreciated, thanks everyone.

Give us a clue ... what version of which distro are you trying to install ???

Give us another clue ... what sort of machine are you trying to install it on ???

Have you seen this:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/review...p?product=1247

ok I'm trying to install Scientific Linux 5.4 on a Dell Inspiron E1405, I actually have gotten back to the set up and have a new problem, after testing the discs and attempting to continue on to installation, the set up exits with this message:
[0x8048cf4]
[0x39a420]
[0x81ae9c8]
[0x805e052]
[0x805edd2]
[0x805efcd]
[0x8049627]
[0x804aa26]
[0x8165108]
[0x8048131]
install exited abnormally[1/1]
sending termination signals... done
sending kill signals... done
disabling swap...
unmounting filesystems...
/mnt/runtime done
disabling/dev/loop0
/proc/bus/usb done
/proc done
/dev/pts done
/sys done
/tmp/ramfs done
/mnt/source done
you may safely reboot your system.

any idea what this error implies??

Short answer: I have no clue

Long answer: As I understand it, from a quick google,an the Dell Inspiron E1405 was made in 2006, with an intel core duo T2300 cpu and integrated graphics and a quick visit to tuxmobil shows that no recent distros have been successfully installed (and been written up). However you might want to read http://www.minasgjoka.com/blog/?p=8 which details a Debian install, and details the partitioning of the Hard drive for the XP default.

I also understand that Scientific Linux is based on RHEL (RedHatEnterpriseLinux) a Distro which I have never tried - even in a virtual machine - and should be similar to the Centos distro. You might want to search for installation problems relating to either of or both these distros.

Again, it has been a long time since I installed a .rpm based distro - so I am probabaly not the best person to help you - but my trials and tribulations trying to install 64bit Kubuntu karmic koala 9.10 alpha and betas on my acer ferrari required numerous experiments changing the install parameters - ended up using a text based install using a different kernel and started with Gnome as the kde desktop wouldn't install until gnome was working. The fact that my bios is old (2003) and my broadcom 4306 wireless miniPCI needed firmware installed before it could see my wifi ISP only added to my problems. luckily I have Suse 9.3, kubuntu 7.04 and Opensuse 10.2 working (all in differnt partitions) and a couple of LVM partitions visible to all distro meant I could still surf the net and download packages to a LVM partiton and then install from there.

My suggested solution for you is to download and burn a copy of Knoppix 5.1 to disk - and then use this live cd to boot up your machine - you can then add a partition for your Scientific Linux - and depending on your success with Knoppix (you may have to include noacpi in your boot command) you can see what works with an older linux kernel.

Can you read in XP the discs that you downloaded using Explorer?

Got to go to work now but I will return later today!

Cheers

The problem ended up solving itself, I only got that error when I tested the discs, if i skip testing the discs I get to the installation process and set up. Only thing is that I'm very new to the whole partitioning thing, I tried letting it create the new partitions automatically on whatever free space there is but it tells me there isn't enough space. It also has only one drive to select from consisting of 70gigs my whole hard drive. I thought the SL install could create new partitions and set it all up for me and that I don't have to manually partition anything, but now I get the feeling that I was wrong about that. Any advice on making the partitioning simple would help, it seems like more of a hassle than it should be as all I want to do is get SL on my system and be able to dual boot between that and windows xp. Anyone with experience with this and could tell me simply what to do, or what to do with Scientific Linux specifically, would be great help. Thanks everyone.

Is your CD of Scientific Linux a Live CD? I've never used it so am not familiar. If it is a Live CD, load it and open a terminal and logon as root user and run the command: fdisk -l (lower case Letter L in the command). This will show your partition information and if you post it here someoone should be able to help. To get to root in a terminal, you usually just type 'su' or 'su -' (without quotes). Some CD's have users 'root' or 'guest' and tell you what the password and sometimes you don't need a password. You might post what you get when you try these commands.

Most Linux distributions have a partition editor and often a GUI like GParted. You should have an option for partitioning like 'Manual' or "expert" which will give you more options.

You may want to contact Flymo who wrote the Scientific Linux review that I posted above, however I am not sure what level of posts you needto be able to send him a message.

re your partitioning problem - if the anaconda installer doesn't/didn't give an option to squash the existing partitions then you are going to have to use something like partitionmagic in XP to safely compress your existing XP partition, you may have to defrag it to move it to the front of the drive [c:\ I presume] then you should create a new drive, e: f: or g: which should be at least 10-12 gigs for a normal graphical linux install. As I mentioned before a Knoppix 5.1 disk will provide all the tools you need to make this a partition which you will have to format from ntfs to something like ext3 (which is ext2 with journalling which ensures integrity of the read/writes in a linux partition).

If the foregoing doesn't mean much to you then I suggest that you do some searching here in LQ or google on 'dual booting' linux w/ XP.

Hope this helps

Ok the anaconda installer gives 4 options: 1. Remove all partitions on selected drives and create default layout. 2. Remove linux partitions on selected drives and create default layout. 3. Use free space on selected drives and create default layout. or 4. Create custom layout.

I chose the third option as I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible. It shows the drives and there is one; sda 74881mb ATA TOSHIBA MK8032GS, I believe this is just my hard drive given the 70gigs. So I click next and get these following errors:

"Error Partitioning"
could not allocate requested partitions
partitioning failed; couldn't allocate partitions as primary partitions.
not enough space left to create partition for /boot.

then click ok and get this..

"Automatic Partitioning Errors"
following errors occured with your partitioning
you have not defined a root partition(/), which is required for installation of Scientific Linux to continue
This can happen if there is not enough space on your harddrive(S) for the installation
Press ok to choose a different partitioning option.

I have partition magic and it shows me my partitions as follows: Dell utility(*, local disk (c, backup (d, local disk(*, and an unallocated space with a size of a whole 7.8mb. Theres roughly 15,000mb free on the local disk(c and about 6,000mb free on the backup(d. Do I need to resize these partitions and create a new one for S.L. to install on?
Or do I need to select a different option from the four in the beginning of this post? I'm unsure of what to do at this point and to keep it simple all I'm trying to do is install this version of Scientific Linux 5.4 and keep my existing version of Windows XP, and have the choice when I start my computer of which I would like to run. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated thanks everyone.