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I have recently purchased a new Dell Precision 360 workstation with 1gb of memory, 40gb hd, and a Nvidia Quadro FX 500 video card. I wiped the hard drive and put in the RH Linux 9 CD to install. After many lines of text, the screen went blank. I went back and reinstalled, using the "linux text" option and got much further this time, supposedly successfully loading Linux. After rebooting the computer, it got as far as "Starting firstboot: " and hangs there.
No, I didn't download the images, I'm installing from the Red Hat CD-ROMs and I have all of the specs for the hardware of the PC. I first used the generic Nvidia Quadro driver, then used the vesa generic video driver, but both times failed. This was done while installing in text mode. When I install in graphical mode it just hangs. When I press ctrl-alt-F1 it shows "1...2...3...4...5.... X server startes successfully."; ctrl-alt-F2 shows "-/bin/sh-2,05b#"; ctrl-alt-F3 shows "* moving (1) to step welcome"; ctrl-alt-F4 shows "<6>parport0: irq 7 detected"; ctrl-alt-F5 shows just a blinking cursor; and ctrl-alt-F7 is blank.
I checked and made sure that hyperthreading is disabled and I tried using noprobe, but still end up at the screens described earlier. I did select the GRUB loader. Would that make a difference?
Thanks everybody for the help...I really appreciate it! I'll get it going sooner or later.
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