Install Problem with 4 distributions??
 

This is a very unusual one (as far as I know), I have installed Linux over 20 times on different machines and really only had problems about 2 years ago when I started and needed to set up partitions. Other then that I've never had a problem with the installation that a little time hasnt solved. This one is very unusual,
Every time I try and install any version of Linux on my friends machine it leads to machine code being displayed on the screen. Line after line after line after line at a very rapid rate, this has happened with 3 different red hats and suse 8.0. This happens just after you choose install on these distributions. I tried both graphical and text installations with no joy?
The machine in question had linux on it about a year and a half ago. It has two hard drives and the first one had this problem a while back. That HD is now corrupted and unusuable but the second HD now has the same problem with installing????
Any help would be great

What is the hardware configuration of the box?

At exactly what step does the RH install fail?

Cheers--
Charles

Its a gateway with 640MB RAM or the like with an 800Mhz Amd.
was looking at red hats site and they said it could be trying to use to much memory during the installation? and to use "mem:64MB" or similar to get it to work?
The last time Linux was on the machine was before he upgraded his memory and he only had 128MB at that stage.
Thanks for the help

I have never run across that, but you can certainly give it a try. I would be more concerned (but then what do I know) with 1) plug-n-play turned on in the bios (turn it off), 2) APM turned on in the bios (turn it off until after a good load), 3) video card incompatibilities. These three have caused me more grief than anything else on installation.

Cheers--
Charles

Thanks I'll turn the two off in the bios, but the video card was detected last time linux was on the system?
Thats whats stumping me that Linux was running fine on it before.

For the APM, sometimes turning it off in the BIOS doesn't work because RH finds it anyway. If you use grub as the boot loader, then at the load screen press "a" and add apm=off to the load line.

Cheers--
Charles