Hello,
I've tried everything I can possibly think of, but I can't get my hard drive to format at the beginning of the Linux installation. There's nothing wrong with the hard drive; it previously had Windows 98 on it and I was able to format it without any problems when booting from a DOS Startup Disk.
However, I ran the RedHat 9 installer, and when it got to the part where it formatted the hard drive (right before copying packages) it kept crashing, saying that there was an error formatting hd1. I've tried several different ways of partitioning it, including no swap partition, and using the / partition as an ext2 format instead of ext3, none of which have worked. I then formatted it again from DOS, loaded the Linux installer and tried leaving it as it was and just setting the one partition I had as the / partition, but it wouldn't allow a vfat format for the / partition.

Can anyone tell me what could be wrong and how to solve it? I really would like to stop using XP already and switch to RedHat, but I have been trying different things for the last 3 weeks already with no luck whatsoever.

Thanks,
- Smiley

your Hard Drive may have bad sectors on it, Windows is good about marking them off and working around them. Not sure about Linux. Hard Drives normaly are only good for 3 to 5 years, if yours is in that area you might want to replace it.

ALSO...did you set All Your Bios seting to default, if not, try that too