Could really use some help

After spending hours on the phone with red hat folks, it was determined I had a bad media to begin with. I have a brand new red hat v.9 shipped to me and arrived this am. Upon trying to install over the bad files and hopefully the installation disk would re format the hard drive. I get to this message.

Running anaconda, the red hat linux system installer - please wait...
install exited abnormally -- recieved signal 11
sending termination signals...done
sending kill signal...done
disabling swap...
unmounting filesystems...
/mnt/runtime done
disabling /dev/loop)0
/proc/bus/usb done
/dev/pts done
/tmp/ramfs done
/mnt/source done
you may safely reboot your system





So I rebooted...(without the installation cd)
grub version windows appear then goes in to a boot up hangs . last command line says

kernel panic: no init found. try passing init= option to kernel.



So I rebooted...(with installion cd)
and typed at the boot command

linux askmethods

and it booted and came back with this


install exited abnormally
sending termination signals...done
sending kill signals...done
disabling swap...
unmounting filesystems...
/mnt/runtime done
disabling /dev/loop0
/proc/bus/usb done
/proc done
/dev/pts done
/tmp/ramfs done
/mnt/source done
you may safetly reboot your system


AHHHHH man, can someone really show me what is wrong and how can i re format the hard drive and install clean all over with a new disk directly from red hat?

Please....and Thank you in advance

by the way, red hat can not continue to give me any more support until I go buy the 16 digit number....


and feeling real dumb....

I had a similar problem with Redhat 7.x
Turned out to be a hardware problem, I think, so I switched to SuSE and had no problems.

You might consider switching to another distro since Redhat is dropping all support of its dot releases (meaning 9.0) next month anyway. If you want to stick with Redhat you will have to buy their enterprise edition.

Ahhh!!! if that is my case then I'm lucky not to go buy a $99 box of red hat and get the 16 digit number.

So would you advise me to scrape the red hat 9.0 and go for the suse profession 9.0?

I'm wasting time here on this new server set up and my other server which was pre installed and setup is about max.

Thanks for the help,


Oh by the way, will the suse overwrite the exisitng red hat and reformat my hard drive?

now after i typed my message earlier, i cant get the boot up no more

I'd recommend spending some time comparing info here:
http://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

then try here for d/l:
http://www.linuxiso.org/

and of course LQ with questions

If you are looking at buying a distro than SuSE is definitly the way to go. They have much nicer support terms than Redhat and are quite a bit more friendly. They were recently bought by Novell who has promised to provide top notch support.

Of course if you do not want the support you can download it and burn your own CD's. That is what I did and yes, it will reformat your hardrive and let you start from scratch.

If you have the bandwidth the easiest way to go is to use the FTP install. The link that Genesee provided to linuxiso.org has what you need to get started.

Should i get the 9.0 live-eval or ftp? the dl is going to my other personal computer then burned with NTI cd burner. my personal computer has win xp, hopefully to convert over to linux one day.

Many thanks guys, you are my hero.

Alright , I got my suse linux installed (ahhh it was a breeze) and i have to make a partion for the c panel to be installed.
I tried to partion the way i was told but i get errors. (this is only thing im stuck as of now)

Should I use partion magic to do the trick?

What exactly are you using to partition your drive?
What were you told?
What errors are you getting?

I need data data data

I gave up on red hat---- bought SUSE 9.0 and everything, meaning the installation was like a sweet cake.

Thanks for recommending it. (thumbs up)

Tomorrow i get c panel installed. (hopefully)