Help For Installing Red Hat 9 On A Formatted Disk
 

Hello :) , I wondered if anyone can help. I pulled out an old PC that used to run Windows 98. I placed a new hard drive into it as the old hard drive was missing. I attempted to install Red Hat 9 and have even attempted installing Mandriva One but when I get my PC to boot from CD ROM (via BIOS settings)using either Red Hat 9 disk or Mandriva, the PC reads the disk and appears to reset itself back to the beginning of my PC starting up. I have tried several times to no avail. I know that my PC will boot up using a windows disk as I have tried a Window 98 disk. I did not complete the windows 98 installation because the disk is corrupt (scratches all over it and the PC is unable to load certain files because of this).

Any help would be greatly appreciated

No one can help me then? :confused:

It is considered bad manners to bump your thread before 24 hours.

Need more info.
How old is this PC? Do you know its specs? Does the PC have a floppy disk drive?
What is the size of the new hard drive. Depending on the age of the PC the BIOS might not be able to handle >32 or >128 GB drives.
Have you configured the drive jumpers correctly? i.e. master / slave / cable select?
Depending on the age of the PC the CDROM drive might not be able to read larger capacity CDs i.e. 700MB. or might have problems reading some CD-Rs.

How old is this PC?

Aproxiamtely 11 years old. It originally had Windows 95 as its operating system

Do you know its specs?

Don't know all the spec

Does the PC have a floppy disk drive?

The PC does have a floppy drive

What is the size of the new hard drive. Depending on the age of the PC the BIOS might not be able to handle >32 or >128 GB drives.

I installed a Hard drive which is about 3.5 GB (Small I know but I bought it on the cheap

Have you configured the drive jumpers correctly? i.e. master / slave / cable select?

The Hard drive is connected on its own IDE cable and is set as a master. The CD Rom is also connected to its own IDE cable and is also set as a master



Hope my answers help. I just hope its not an age thing

Thanks in advance

Darren

The drive might not be able to read the CD.
Try creating a boot floppy.
Use the winrawrite.exe in windows or rawrite.exe for DOS utility to create a boot disk using the boot.img file in the /images directory on the 1st CD.

I used rawrite.exe for DOS utility and made a floppy using the "bootdisk.img" found under the images folder on CD1. I haven't used winrawrite.exe Windows but I supposed this doesn't matter. I have checked this on my other PC that uses XP Home edition and that PC successfully detects the CD from Boot up, so I know its not a CD problem

In other words, using the rawrite.exe for DOS utility and making a floppy using the "bootdisk.img" and getting the PC to boot from A drive does not work either

So when you tried the Red Hat 9 CD in the old computer CDROM drive it would not boot, but in the newer machine the same CD will boot up? This sounds like a bad CDROM drive in the old computer. I have had this happen before. Old CDROMS can have trouble reading modern CD's. Can you borrow the cdrom from the newer machine just for the install?

Also, Red Hat 9 is going to be a bear to run on an 11 year old computer. That is either a Pentium running at maybe 200mhz, or a PII at 366mhz. If the memory is the same vintage it is unlikely it has more than 64meg of ram. KDE and Gnome will bog it down. Your hard drive is going to get real full too.

Try Damn Small Linux, or Vector Linux Standard Edition (not SOHO). One of those will be alot more useable. They use Fluxbox or IceWM instead of KDE for the default desktop, and both are alot of fun.

Good luck.

C

Many thanks for the reply, I'll see if I can download those Operating system and I might give the CD ROM solution ago :)