Fail to mount root FS on install
 

I've been using an old Dell Optiplex Gx1 (P3/500). I swapped a 20gb Seagate drive into this Dell box. The Seagate already had a working copy of Fedora 1 from another one of my machines. I booted up and it detected all the "new" hardware and works fine.

I tried to do a fresh install with the same drive in this machine though, from a bootable CD, and the installer exits abnormally with an error saying it failed to mount root FS. Are we talking about the CD-rom or HDD at this point?

I investigated and tried to install Mandrake 10 and SuSE 9 and got the same error followed by a similar abrupt halt.

I can say that everything's done right on the hardware end of things - jumpers and BIOS settings are all correct for the hard drive, and both the drive and all cables are known working components. Same goes for the CD drives. I also tried the same installs on the same machine with a 6.4gb Maxtor and had similar results.

I don't really even know where to start looking here - any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Drew

How much ram do you have? I can't recall what the minimum is to install on most recent distros but it's either 64MB or 128MB.

How far are you getting in the installation process when this error occurs?