Hi All
I have a Pentium 111 733 machine with 512MB Ram that I have done an Fdisk on so that it does not have another operating system on it. I am trying to install Mandrake 9.1 from 3 CDs I purchased with a Linux magazine. I can boot the machine to the garphic interface but when I hit enter to install I get a blank screen with two green flashing lights on the keyboard. If I hit F1 and then try and do a text install or type Linux vga=0 I get a kernel panic. I have looked this up and found this:
Error scenario: When using a file for your / (a "loopback"), booting your newly installed system will fail with a kernel panic with flashing keyboard lights.
Why: The initrd needs to load the loop.o module to mount your / partition, but recently loop.o depends on aes.o and because mkinitrd does not handle dependencies automatically, the change was not noticed and mkinitrd was not updated accordingly.
Solution: Format a floppy disk with a DOS filesystem (in Linux, you can use the command "mkdosfs /dev/fd0"). Copy patch.pl to the floppy disk. Remove the floppy and reboot using the Mandrake Linux 9.1 CD1 to do a CD-ROM installation. During boot, press F1 at the splash screen, then place your floppy disk that contains patch.pl in the floppy drive. At the prompt, type "patch", then follow the installation as usual.
I tried this but it does not work as the moment I hit the enter key after typing patch the PC starts running the install from the CD_Rom, it never even looks at the A drive to see if there is a patch there. Any ideas?
I really would like to give Linux a try.