Hi all, complete here, never even used Linux on another system

I added a new 60GB hard drive to my windows box last weekend. I partitioned it into 3 equals. With all the additional space I thought I'd install Linux as well, using the third partition on drive 2. So I did quite a bit of reading on the net and decided to go for RH8. On Saturday I bought 'Red Hat Linux 8 The Complete Reference' bootable DVD edition by McGraw Hill/Osborne and have tried to install it since.

My hardware is as follows:

ASUS A7V mobo, AMD Athlon 800MHz and 256MB RAM
HD1: Quantum Fireball 20GB - 3 partitions
HD2: Western Digital WD60 60GB - 3 partitions
Conexant HCF V90 56K
Fujitsu FDX-1230
RealTek RTL8139(A)-based PCI Fast Ethernet
Rage Fury Pro/Xpert 2000 Pro
Sound Blaster PCI
DV 1000LE IEEE1394 Host Controller

I re-formatted the 3rd partition on the second drive to be a Linux one using PartitionMagic.

After booting from the DVD I get the setup and it asks me to hit Enter at the boot: prompt. It then starts detecting the hardware which looks normal at the start (at least I think so ), and the following lines are the last ones before it stops:


hda: IRQ probe failed (0xfffffff8)
hda: IRQ probe failed (0xfffffff8)
hda: no response (status = 0x0a), resetting drive
hda: IRQ probe failed (0xfffffff8)
hda: no response (status = 0x0a), resetting drive
hdb: IRQ probe failed (0xfffffff8)
hdb: IRQ probe failed (0xfffffff8)
hdb: no response (status = 0x0a), resetting drive
hdb: IRQ probe failed (0xfffffff8)
hdb: no response (status = 0x0a), resetting drive
hdc: Pioneer DVD-ROM
hde: Quantum Fireball, ATA Disk drive
hdf: WDC WD600AB, ATA Disk drive
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
ide2 at 0x8400-0x8407,0x8002 on irq 10
blk: queue c02e836c, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7


Question 1: I read that when you have 2 HD's installed then drive 1 is hda and drive 2 is hdb. How come mine are hde and hdf?!

Question 2: What on earth does 'spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7' mean?

After some googling I found that 8259A is Intel's programmable interrupt controller. Also, IRQ7 is usually used by the parallel port. So I went into the BIOS, disabled the port and booted again. Same message, same point.

Earlier I pulled out all the cards in my box and unplugged everything else apart from the mouse and keyboard before attempting to install again, but it still keeps hanging with the same message.

Anyone out there who came across this before? If you need more details then don't hesitate to ask

Laurent

Do a search on it by clicking the search button up top. Someone else had the same problem, and got it resolved. Might want to read the entire thread, just to familiarize yourself.


Just so you know, "spurious" interrupt means that the OS (linux) has no idea why the BIOS is calling for this interrupt, but it is.

It amounts to adding ide=nodma on the end of the linux prompt, but take a look anyway. :_)