Hi guys.I'm a linux newbie and obviously im tryin to find or helpin myself to eliminate slowly the windows out of my way.LOL =)..anyway, i just installed my Red hat linux 7.3 in my HP pavilion laptop (a dual-boot with windows xp pro on my 1st partition). I did a successful installation of my red hat in the machine with a GRUB bootloader. The problem was it hanged as soon as i selected and boot the red hat linux smp and also the red hat linux (w/o smp).Im wondering what went wrong. here's my GRUB:

Grub version 0.91 (631K lower / 1046528K upper memory)

Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-3smp)
Red Hat Linux-up (2.4.18-3)
Windows XP Pro



[Red Hat Linux-up (2.4.18-3smp)]
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-3smp ro root=/dev/hde6 hda=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.18-3smp.img

[Red Hat Linux-up (2.4.18-3)]
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-3 ro root=/dev/hde6 hda=ide-scsi
initrd /initrd-2.4.18-3.img

[Windows XP Pro]
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

Then after many days of frustrations, i decided to re-install red hat and this time i used LILO. When i tried to select red hat linux in the bootloader a black screen loaded together with some initialization and detecting hardware configuration like CPUs, memory..etc..After a few seconds it hanged after this line:

...
ENABLING IO-APIC IRQs
Setting 2 in the phys_id_present_map
...changing IO-APIC physical APID ID to 2 ... ok.

my laptop freeze to death and i don't know what to do now..can anyone help my problem so as i can start to learn linux?

and by the way this is my laptop specs:


HP Pavilion DV6000 series
System Manufacturer Hewlett-Packard
System Model MCP51M
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 72 Stepping 2 AuthenticAMD ~1607 Mhz
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 72 Stepping 2 AuthenticAMD ~1607 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Hewlett-Packard F.36M1, 6/1/2007
SMBIOS Version 2.4
Total Physical Memory 1,024.00 MB



I highly appreciate anyone who could help me with this problem.

Thank you..

Snake

Support for RH7 was dropped years ago. Save yourself a ton of needless trouble and switch to a supported version. Fedora is RH's free version and is available for free download(current version is Fedora 8). Centos is RedHate Enterprise Linux (RHel) with the logos removed(free to download as well). RH switched it's naming format after RH9 to RHEL . The current version of RHEL is 5.1 (or Centos 5.1). As you can see you are between 6 and 8 versions behind the curve. The advances in the ease of use and compatibility since RH7 is monumental. Running RH7 is a little like running windows 95.

Thank you for an informative reply.I'll keep in touch as soon as i downloaded and installed Fedora 8.

By the way, which is better to use? mandriva (the lates version) or Fedora 8?

There's a lot of opinion in that question, and many would be willing to argue for hours about the relative merits of one distribution over another. That said, I generally recommend Fedora or Ubuntu for people just learning Linux.