I am having some serious problems installing RedHat Linux 7.1.

First of all, the setup program will usually crash out during the initial probing, forcing me to restart the machine. Sometimes I get an "input/output error" but it varies a lot. There is no difference if using GUI, text or expert modes.

When setup does actually run, I try to do a partitionless install on a newly formatted 2GB drive D. The next problem comes at the end. Half the time I get an "unknown exception error" and half the time I get a message telling me I'm probably out of disk space (which I'm sure I'm not!).

Please help!

what kind of hardware do you have your trying to install on? also, have you tried a non-partionless install and tried a custom install setting up your own partitions, usually at a bare minimum to always have a /boot, swap and / partition.

I'm afraid I forgot to mention a few things in my first post. My HDD is 6GB in total, with Win98 installed on a 4GB partition and 2GB unallocated and ready for RedHat.

I have tried installing RedHat in a few different ways:
1. On a DOS FAT formatted drive with a partionless install,
2. Using automatic partitioning with the unallocated space,
3. Manual partition with Disk Druid, and
4. Manual partition with fdisk (with partitions as you suggested).

None of these methods have worked for me, even with the smallest install possible. Sometimes I get a message saying that it can't continue because I have manually edited the partitions, and the rest of the time it tells me I'm out of disk space (which I can't be!)

I still haven't found a way around my problems at the start, but I'm getting used to rebooting now, so as long as that isn't linked to my "out of space" error then it doesn't worry me.

I'm not able to tell you the exact details of my system, except that it's a ~400Mhz AMD K6-2 with one 6GB HDD, an S3 video card and a whole bunch of Plug-and-Play devices (gamepad, camera etc.) running Win98 SE.

I would be happy to try pretty much anything to get this working, but I don't want to risk losing Win98 with anything fancy.

Does anybody think I would have the same kind of problems with an earlier or different version of Linux? And where might I find a good distribution?

well, redhat is one of the best distro's. Without being insulting, i'd put down your problems to equal measures of bad luck and lack of experience.

you might want to get redhat 7.2 out this week, with lots of improvements and such. should be downloadable on redhat.com by now.

alternatively, mandrake is the newbie distro.

An alternate solution *might* be to get Partition Magic (v6 or better), which, when installed on your win partition will allow you to format your available space as an ext2 (linux +swap) partition.

Then, do the install.


could be, too, that your HD is on its way out. I had that happen to me the other day on a 6gb HD...couldn't figure out why I was gettting such terrible I/O errors whenever I tried to do something on my linux box. I replaced it with a 3gb HD, reinstalled, and so far haven't a lick of trouble. At least, with that sort of thing.

Gnome, on the other hand....grrrrr

If you use partition magic or similar, always defrag your windoze disk first. If not, when you resize the partition, windoze doesn't know where anything is. I didn't do this, as I didn't know it was essential. Bye bye working laptop, hello stylish silver doorstop (couldn't get Linux to function properly either).
Jim.