A couple nights ago I finaly got around to loading a copy of RH8 that I have had laying around for a while, onto a win98 system I have at home. It worked fine, and I decided that before I dl everythng that I was gonna need I would reformat all my drives, and I would reinstall both windows and RH8. I reformated everything and reinstalled windows without a problem, but when I try to reload linux I get just past the piont where it recognizes the HDs and the CDroms, and I get this: blk: queue c02e836e, i/o limit 4095mb (mask 0xffffffff), and the system locks up. I cant even turn the thing off with the onoff switch I need to unplug it from the wall. I can however open and close both cd drives. Does anyone have any clue as to what might cause this and what I can do about it? Or where I can go to get help?

When you say "reformat" I hope you mean "repartition". You can't really install linux and windows on the same partition. You need to create one partition for windows. One for data (so you can share it between windows and linux) then the freee space will be partitioned by RedHat During the install.

Have you verified the CD's using the "media check" feature. If you downloaded the CD's you should also verify the MD5 sums.

I didnt bother partioning the drives because I have three, when it worked the first time I had win on my c drive and redhat took the d drive. I redownloaded a copy of the first disk, wondering if that was the problem but go the same error...but how do I check the MD5 sums?

Here is how to check the MD5 sums:
http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/verifyiso.html

if that doesn't solve your problem, try burning it to a cd-rw disc and see if that works.
also, you can disable plug n play in your bios.
if you're still having problems, try red hat 7.3 or 9 - either of them are much better than 8 imho.

I just downloaded RedHat 9, and installed that without a problem, but thanks for the help.