I am a Linux Newbie tryin to intall Red Hat 9.0. I've tried numerous times with no success. I first tried to keep a win98 fat 32 partition, but moved to just trying to install Linux only. Here are some hardware facts:

I am using a Western Digital Caviar 40 GB drive. The Western Digital Data Lifegaurd Diagnostics utility Reports
CHS = 77545 Cylinders 16 Heads 63 Sectors

My Motherboard is an ASUS TUV4x running the latest AwardBIOS update v1005.

The AwardBIOS Settings for Drive are:
Type [Auto]
Cylinders [1024]
Head [255]
Sector [63]
CHS Capacity 8422 MB
Maximum LBA Capacity 40020 MB

Multi-Sector Transfers [Maximum]
SMART Monitoring [Disabled]
PIO Mode [4]
ULTRA DMA Mode [5]

I am running with 256MB of ram with a Pentium III 1000MHz chip on the mobo.


Here is my current procedure:

I boot with win98 boot disk and fdisked the master boot record.
FDISK /MBR

I then boot into a bootable Linux CD that I downloaded from LNX BBC and I run the Linux version of fdisk. I get an error or alert I should say that goes like this:

"The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4865. There is nothing wrong with this, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g. old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g. DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)"

I set up my partitions on /DEV/HDA

Disk /dev/hda: 255 Heads, 63 Sectors, 4865 Cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks id System
/dev/hda1 1 11 88326 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 12 77 530145 82 Linux Swap
/dev/hda3 78 1024 7606777+ 83 Linux

I created hda1 for my /boot partition, hda2 for my swap partition, and hda3 for my / (root) partition.


After I have my partitions set and I reboot (with the RH9 install CD) I get the Red Hat Boot prompt. I type:

BOOT: Linux LBA

This starts the install. I set my language and keyboard settings to English, and select a generic three button wheel mouse driver. I then pick workstation install and then click on manually partition with Disk Druid. It detects /dev/hda2 as my swap and offers to format it as a Linux Swap Partition. I click yes. I then set my mount point for my /boot and / (root) partitions and set the format to ext3. I click next and then format to verify that I want to format these 3 partitions. I then leave GRUB as my boot loader. Under advanced, I choose to Install GRUB on the MBR and then I check force LBA32. The General kernal parameters field has hdc=ide-scsi which I don't change. I then get this alert:

"Forcing the use of LBA32 for your bootloader when not supported by the BIOS can cause your machine to be unable to boot. We highly recommend you create a boot disk when asked to in the install process."

I click force lba32. I don't change any firewall settings, I leave English (USA) as default language for system and I select my time zone location. I set my root password and then I press next. A dialog pops up that says Checking Package information and then I get an error that install exited abnormally.

What do I do? I can't get past this point.

Are you sure your installation cd is burned correctly? Have you used md5summer (www.md5summer.org) to check if the sum of downloaded image is the same as the orginal one (from the site you downloaded it)?

I haven't...I didn't download this distro though. It is a publishers edition version of Red Hat 9 from the book Red Hat Linux 9 Unleashed. It is a brand new set of CDs. I've had other problems with pub versions of Linux from a couple of books I got from the Library (RH7.1 & RH7.2).

If you have a chance to try the cd with another machine (or just another cdrom driver)... If I remember correctly, there was (not sure if it still is) an option in RH (in advanced options from boot prompt) to check the cd. You may try it.

I don't see an option to check the CD from the boot prompt. I did try another CD drive and go the same symptoms from it as the other drive.

A text install results in a screen of endless looping address numbers flying up the screen in two columns with some other indistinguishable info flying by as well.

If you have a chance to try to install from the cd on another machine, do it. But my guess is that there's problem with cd media.

I finally figured out how to check the CD media and the Linux install said that the CD passed. I've tried turning off the PnP settings in the BIOS and that still doesn't do anything. I tried another 40GB harddrive as well...Same exact caviar model with the same results. I did get a geometry error, but I fdisked the MBR and that went away.

Im having a simliar prob with RH9. Ive been trying to install since 10:30 this morning with no success. I give up. See my post on this board for details.

I have found that some motherboards, peripherals (even some CDR drives!) are not RH9 (SuSE, Fedora Core 2) compatible. I know we aren't all rich, but try another computer or peripheral, whichever is easier to try first.