hello

I did give fair warning that I would start buging all u LQ guys from the start... so ... here goes.

I have a toshiba A100 series laptop and what I simply did was...
1- boot from a Red Hat 9 cd.
2- pressed "enter" to start the graphical user interface boot

after a big bunch of fast moving data I am greeted with a welcome to linux screen, only there is a loading ochi1394 drives box in the center and nothing is happening; the dvd drive is silent, no hdd activity. I rebooted and used the boot command "linux noprobe" and again was greeted by the same screen. third times a charm they say so thinking maybe the media is corrupted or something I rebooted with the "checkmedia" boot command and got stuck at the same place. I think although not quite sure these are the firewire drivers but how can I get round this problem? will I end up bashing my brain out(I do not have any spare parts so I cannot... and I stress... cannot replace the brain I will loose )trying to manually config the system after booting in expert mode?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

one more newb side question: IS VFAT and FAT32 the same file system?

Let me be the first to tell you that Redhat 9 is obsolete and would suggest using a more recent distribution. If you want to stick with Redhat based then try Fedora 13. All your problems just might go away.

ohci1394 is one of the core modules for firewire.

Yes, in a nutshell vfat is FAT32 but can be also used for FAT16 and FAT12 filesystems

What are the hardware specifications for your laptop.

yeah I know its a 2003 release OS but still... the place where I am at, you did not get to see much of linux in those days, so I had to make quite some effort to get my hands on some linux cds and still not be able to install it after so much time has gone by and that much effort would be so sad. besides I have to solve my problems or they will eventually drive me nuts bcoz as ur quote says I too do not believe in impossibity, there has to be solution

so just humor me pppppppppplzzzz.

my toshiba a100-237 specs. are:
intel core duo t2400 1.83Ghz processor
intel 945m chipset
ati x1600 mobile graphic card
512MB RAM
bluetooth
intel pro wireless
ilink firewire interface
modem and LAN interfaces
80GB HDD of which:
1st part. 25GB fresh copy of xp
2nd part. 40GB my personel junk space
3rd part. rest for linux (I really don,t know if 5GB would be enough or not, I want a part of it to be VFAT so I can share files between XP and RH if ever needed)

Is there any boot command parameter that can stop the module from trying to load in the first place (I have no need for firewire interface anyway) or let me interact during the boot process as in after each step?

gracias in advance

Just to humor you a bit. Even if you get past the first problem you still might have problems because RH 9 does not have support for SATA controllers. The BIOS may have a legacy setting which might work. RH 9 will not have any built in support for your LAN, wireless, blue tooth or video graphics adapters.

You can try the noapic kernel option. At the prompt type in
linux noapic

If you can not download a new distribution may I suggest ordering a CD.
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

IIRC. In RedHat 9 and earlier you could get into the "interactive" mode by pressing "I" repeatedly as soon as you press "Enter" at the bootloader menu.

ok as u suggested I have ordered ubuntu from above link.......... but still.... .... never say die.

button bashing my "I" key is not working nor is "noapic", then out of frustation I typed "linux @#!^ $*#(ur fav profanity goes here)" and the boot loader booted me to the same stuck up screen, from which I came to realize that the stupid bootloader is taking no arguments...hmmm...taking no arguments..its like arguing with your wife or something .

anyways the new course of action is:
1.create a 5GB VFAT (fat32) part. from the above mentioned free space (done)
2.dump my CDs there
3.try to boot from a updated version of boot loader or/and change the version of firewire module to a fresher version.

ofcourse I am still a newbie in the linux world so I don't know if it will work or not so doing some research.