Nightmare on Red Hat 8
 

I recently posted a thread on problems dual booting my XP machine with Red Hat 8. I didn't get much help there, and I couldn't find any solid answers on LQ, redhat.com, or elsewhere on the Net. So I decided to reformat my machine, and install RH8 by iteself.
Guess what? It STILL doesn't work! :confused: I did everything I could think of, wiped all drives clean, installed RH8 in a new partition (at the beginning of the drive), partitioned using Disk Druid (and not Partition Magic), installed LILO, and this is what I get when my machine tries to boot:
Searching for Boot Record from IDE0: Found
Error loading operating system
When I boot from my RH8 boot floppy, I get:
Kernel panic: no init found
Needless to say, I'm a bit frustrated. I had a fully-functioning RH7.3/XP dual-boot machine, then "upgraded" to RH8.0 (which actually has less functionality than 7.3; see multimedia capability), then 8.0 stopped working. I have read often that to dual boot, Windoze should be installed first, so I wiped the thing clean, re-installed Windows XP, and then tried to re-install RH8.0 (see above thread). That didn't work, so I wiped clean tried to install 8.0 AGAIN, and now I'm back to Square 1.
Any similar experiences? success stories? ideas? At this point, I'll take anything I can get!
Thanks.

Just did a quick search on K7S5A at LQ and it turns up some results. Tho other than bad mem, flashing bioses and general bad remarks in the direction of mobo manglers ECS nothing turns up that would help I think. Maybe this can give some leads in the BIOS settings dept. Plus it seems there's even a K7S5A HOWTO and a K7S5A FAQ.
Dunno if any of these apply to your situation, but since I guess you're at the point of either restoring RH7.3+w32 or helping this mobo out of it's misery you might as well see if there's something there...

Thanks unSpawn; those are pretty cool links that I haven't seen before and prolly wouldn't have found otherwise. I did search LQ several times, but as you mentioned, not much helpful info here.
I'm a bit concerned, as I haven't changed any of the BIOS settings since I last had RH 7.3 running, and I have successfully re-installed XP several times since, so I don't know how/why it would be a BIOS issue.
I'm disappointed in and fairly fed-up with RH in general. I've reported bugs with 8.0 as I've come across them, and I've asked for help on this specific issue, and they come back with "we don't offer support; use our forums," which are disabled and have been for some time.
I've gone ahead and re-re-wiped out my system, re-installed XP, and I think I'm going to try another distro. I DLed Mandrake 9, which appeared to be just one ISO and an additional security ISO... but it turns out the mirror I was using is screwy, and there are 2 more discs to get for installation! So now I've got a few more hours before I can finish the install, but it could be worse... thank goodness for broadband!

I know how to fix your problem,

First - don't use RH - EVER !!!

Second - place a slackware CD in the driver and reboot :) Then follow the on screen instructions.

Welll Mandrake was not what I expected (but it DID install, which tells me something about RH8!), though I did install only the first disc of three possible discs. After installing, I got a strange video display, a red background, and a very limited right-click menu. For any who've installed Mandrake 9: is this the result of a common, successful installation?
Since I'm trying to lure my wife, a Mac/XP user, into Linux, I would like ultimately to use a distro that combines graphical desktops and compatablilty (for her) with excellent tweaking and configuration power .
I give up on Red Hat 8, and there's no use reverting to an earlier version.
Mandrake gets great reviews, but maybe I'm doing something wrong during install <?>.
Slackware certainly seems stable, but it's not likely the desktop solution I need.
Lycoris and Xandros look like they may be very good desktop distros... but from where can I actually download them?
Since this forum is Linux - Distributions, I hope I can get some answers and opinions here without flames?
Thanks!

I have never used Mandrake, but everyone who does seems to like it.

Xandros is not free I don't think, I believe you have to buy it.

Mandrake seems to come with a lot of tools and apps in order to make your transition from Win to Linux. I perfer slackware though.

Little harsh on Red Hat there arnt you?

Yes, but given my recent experiences with v8.0, I can't say I blame him.

deesto..not sure what could be causing this problem. I have loaded RH 8 on my home desktop which is also running XP and did not have any trouble. Forgive the question, but are you sure that grub was installed in the MBR and not in a root directory? And you are correct in saying that XP needs to be loaded first. This way when RH is loaded it should see the XP partition and load it into the boot menu.

From the sounds of it, with just reason :-)

Personally I have had nothing but issues with RH after version 7.
RH is becoming bloatware, tends to do things their own way (non-standard), the kernels they supply are crufty and combined with the usually modified glibc and gcc (and god knows what else) you can have a LOT of fun building anything on it.

Their last good release was 6.2, ever since then they have seemed hell bent on munging everything...

well.... I had a similar problem but i didnt use lilo... i use GRUB... I had to edit the coinfig file because it hid the flag of drive c so that it didn't show up so i couldent load both xp and rh8.0.... If u can get it into grub i can give you code to make it dual boot fine

Darkstar, Nefarious: I used every possible combination of GRUB, LILO, MBR/first HD partition, etc., I could think of, and nothing worked for me. I even tried separate drives for each OS; no joy there either. Right now, I have XP sitting on a partition that's half a 40-GB drive (which XP has somehow labeled "E:", even though the OS is sitting on it), and another 8-GB to play with if need be (slow as heck, but it's there). If you have any suggestions for another go at installing the OS, I'm game!
mdh: I agree; RH has been headed in the same route as MS for a few years now, but it's semi-compatibility sure is tempting. Could you suggest a possible distro to use instead of RH?
Thanks to all. I'm not happy about the way things are going, but it's always nice to see responses and help.

deesto...might be a good idea to give Mandy a shot. Sometimes certain flavors of Linux just don't go with certain machines. I purchased Suse 8.1. Never had a problem with Suse before, but with this version on this laptop, KDE runs so slow I can't use it. Now I have 3 drives for this laptop and I have RH 8, Mandrake 9 and Suse 8.1. RH and Mandy run KDE fine, but not Suse. Just one of those things. Give Mandy a shot and see if that works for you. If I can help you out with it, let me know.

Thanks Darkstar. OK, I'm going in with Mandy 9.0... GRUB to MBR, right? Should I use the "CLIC" version?

It seems to me that you've moved beyond using RH, but I used to run a 98/2000/XP/RH (Installed in that order)machine. It ended up that I couldn't boot 2000 or XP directly, but if I chose 98 (from GRUB) The Windows bootloader would come up, and I could choose which windows to use. But, since you are a) moving away from RH, and b) wouldn't want to install 98, this probably won't help, but maybe give someone an idea... good luck :)