Complete Newbie here...
As of yesterday I had a good Dual boot system running redhat 8.0, during a services restart, I accidently restarted firstboot((STUPID MISTAKE)). Needless to say my system froze and completely wigged out, so naturally I decided to restart and reinstall, not so easy, when I rebooted, the system would run firstboot over and over and over again, and never actually brin gme to a login screen, when I booted with the distro CD the system would hang with a blue screen for about 20mins... then say install failed or something to that effect and then kill all operations and tell me it was safe to reboot.

So Linux would not boot, I then tried to remove all traces of linux and try again.... got my system to continue to boot to w2k and tried using fdisk to remove the linux partion.... as I have read in many posts... this doesn't happen... I gave up about 30mins ago and removed ALL my partions from my HD, repartioned to one disk using a win98 statup disk as a OS base. Now I thought my system was ready to boot with the redhat cd in the drive....

SAME PROBLEM, linux starts install... hangs with blue screen, been 35mins now, what do I do... I have a bought distro set of cd's and I know it is compatible with my system b/c I had a samba server running on it yesterday.....

Please help......?

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I never learned a thing without breaking something beforehand!

ME again... got a little further with booting with the cd..... tried noprobe, no luck!, tried askmethod, got slightly further than before.....
I was asked to input language, and then US english.. and then ... back to blue screen hang for well.... 40mins plus now...
so unless Linux is a blue screen with yellow text "Welcome to Red Hat Linux" , then I am not happy?!?! Although the cd blinking light is quite facinating......

I week into Linux now and starting to think , Why?, b/c I like having to blugeon a winmodem driver to work, bc I like using filesystems that need software I don't have just to be partioned...... no, bc I heard that Linux was the best and I could run it on a low resource machine to effectively manage my fileshares ,a webserver and act as a "secure" filewall!!!!!!

* Looks at second monitor* ..... I thought getting away from Microsoft meant no more BLUE SCREENS?


I apologise for my little venting session, just angry at the learning curve..... Any help will be greatly appreciated and added to my notes.

So even re-writing your MBR, deleting all partitions and formatting them....making your hardrive COMPLETELY CLEAN....it still comes up like that?

Geeez i don't know what could've happened there...

Are you booting the c.d via a floppy bootdisk or by the actual c.d rom

#Garry

Actual cd..... although I may have spoken too soon...
I am browsing the dos utilities and saw a name I recongnised from a post ....FIPS ... I ran it and it shows I have ...... HArd to explain...

Part Bootable head cycld .............etc....... MB
1 yes 38162
2 no
3 no
4 no
then next screen...
I see a list of "stuff"... something cathes my eye... No. of FATS 2
I shouldn't have 2... I completely wiped the drive ((40gig)) and partioned it as fat32... plus I replaced the mbr using w2k's safemode console so it shouldn't have any recolection of a Linux boot or ext3?!?!?!

page down......

OLD Partion cylinder NEw partion
15.7 MB 2 38146.5 MB

I can choose to C ontinue or R reedit...... Reedit lets me change the above Old and new partion values
If I Continue... I get error......
Error: 12-bit FAT not supported: number of clusters is 200
Bye!
Memory allocation error
Cannot load COMMAND, system halted....

WOw... this is all realtime happening right now :-) HOw exciting

Found autoboot in Same folder... ran it.... I am currenlty in the graphical install... at the partioning stage... taking everything out and starting from scratch.

Summary...
Use boot disk ((MS or RH)) to get access to cd in dos mode... run autoboot in DOSUTILS folder on CD1 of Rehat 8.0 Distro.... why it worked.... Angas?!?! translation- "I don'tknow!"

Hope this helps someone..... :-)