Can someone please help me?
I have now installed Red Hat v7 3 times onto my hard drive. Each installation tales about 4 hours. On every occasion I have chosen to install all components offered (gnome, Kde, and games).When prompted I insert a blank formatted floppy to create a boot floppy, at the end of the installation. When I try to re-boot into Linux the computer just loads up windows. When in windows I have tried to look at the contents of the floppy, but all I get is a message stating the floppy is unformatted or that the network or device is not responding. I know that the floppy drive is the first boot option because I used an installation boot floppy.
Any help would be much appreciated.

You need to go to the redhat site and search for a pre-made boot disk. You should be able to find what you are looking for.

Also, goto http://www.linuxdoc.org
In the How-to section there is a document called bootdisk-Howto. To save you searching its here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/doc...Bootdisk-HOWTO

Read that to see if there is anything of use.

Don't really know what your problem could be (just a newbie myself too :-) but I remembered something from my Linux course that maybe of some help....

LILO (the linux boot loader) can only be started from the first 1024 cilinders of your harddisk, so maybe thats were something goes wrong in your install.... because nowadays everybody seems to have HD's with atleast 10GB and they usually have about 2000 cilinders, partitioning a drive like that into 2 separate parts , one for Windows and one for Linux could place your /boot partition of Linux onto cilinders above 1024 makeing it impossible to boot Linux.
The solution is to create a separate /boot partition (about 16MB will be sufficient to put the kernel in and leave some space available for recompiling aswell) and have that put as "high" up your harddisk as posible (above the 1024 cilinders).

note: most linux installation programmes that have partition tools will take care of this for you automaticly.

I wonder if the problem is that I have a 2nd hard drive of 1.7gb for Linux that has been formatted as a FAT 32 not Fat 16? Any thoughts

Newbie, I need to know the answers to the following questions.
What hard drives to you have on your comp? Where is Linux installed? Can you get into Linux at all? What media did you use to install Linux (i.e. floppy, cdrom etc....).

The reason that you cannot look at the contents of the floppy is because it is not an msdos or compatible filesystem (such as Fat23).

I assume that you have the floppy in the computer when it boots up and that the floppy drive is the first drive to be checked for Boot parameters (go into your BIOS and have a look).

Do you see anything different to the load up when you have the floppy in the drive? (do you see the floppy drive light come on? do you see LILO load up?).

I need to know exactly what is happening. Cheers.

Just to cover all areas and I know this may sound stupid but have you checked your BIOS boot up system, is the first thing that your system does is to check the floppy if it does not you need to go into your bios and chage the settings from what it is checking first to the A:

Newbie. If you can't boot to a floppy, as some of the others asked you to check, you probably don't have your CMOS set to for the floppy drive as your boot device. If you put a non bootable disk in your drive and it was set to the first boot device, it'd most likely error that it can't boot.
Are you able to boot to an MSDOS boot diskette? Verify if you can boot to an MSDOS boot diskette, if you can, then the problem might be with your Linux boot diskette. But it may be a lot of lost effort trying to fix a Linux bood diskette problem if you can't boot to any diskette. We'd have to figure out why you can't boot to any floppy at all.

-- L. James