I have a P.O.S. Pentium 100 that I decided I would learn linux on. The bios wil not allow a boot from CDROM. I made boot disks from every available image to no avail.

I originally started with mandrake. The boot would fail while loading "vlinuz.rmd". It would begin, but fail after about 20 seconds loading. I tried all the different boot images without success.

I downloaded REDHAT 8.0 to see if it was maybe MANDRAKE that was the problem. Same thing, boot failed. The only difference is the boot would fail on the second file being booted which was ("initrnd.rmd" <-- not 100% sure bout filename.)

During the boot process, the cdrom does not spin up.

Is this PC too old to run linux?
I am out of ideas. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

If you have dos on your system you can copy the image into
the floppy using the rawwrite utility that is generally
accompanies any distribution .Better try Redhat 7.0 ,it runs
hassle free even on a p-133 with 32 Mb Ram and minimun of requirements

I have been using rawrite to make bootdisks.
When I boot up with the bootdisk, that's when i get the boot failed error.

I've tried with a lot of different version RH, and Mandrake image files. None of them seem to load properly.

I guess I'm too much of a newbie to understand what is going wrong. This is my first attempt at running Linux.



This is what I get when Redhat 8.0 bootdisk loads:

Loading initrd.img................
Loading vmlinuz....
Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue.

I figured it out.
It was a combination of crappy hardware and not enough ram.
I added some ram and now it works. Hardware is still shaky, but it's working.