Hello, I recently purchased RedHat 9 and have been having problems with a hang at installation. I have contacted the technical support and they have failed to get back to me after a few days so I decided I shouldn't wait any longer for help.
First of all, my computer specs are as follows:
P4 2.4C ghz
Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard
1024mb Samsung pc 3200 ram
ATI radeon 9700 pro
120gb 8mb cache Western Digital hard drive
80 gb Seagate hard drive
52x24x52 Lite-On cdrw drive
Onboard sound and LAN.

My problem, is that after hitting the enter key to begin the installation, it hangs upon getting to these lines:
ide0 at 0xefe0-0xefe7,0xefae on irq 3
ide1 at 0xefa0-0xefa7,0xefaa on irq 3

I assume this must be a hardware issue and I have no idea how to get around this hang. If anyone has experienced this or has any suggestions I'd appreciate your input. Thanks!

just off the top of my head, and this may or may not work, but there is a good chance that it might, but go into your BIOS and load setup defaults and save, and then retry...
with my experience with alot of things, this simple step solves numerous problems.

I'll try that and post my results. Thanks for the suggestion.

Well the computer got past the part where it would hang, and got into the actual installation itself. My problem now is that when I go to select the partitioning method it says this: You have not defined a root partition (/), which is required for installation of RedHat Linux to continue. What does this mean? I had already made a 20 gb partition on my 120gb drive for redhat with partition magic in windows 2000, and I select it but it gives that error.

Hi Scoughlin

The key is to just let Red Hat install into some completely free space - ie don't create a partiton and filesysytem in advance - the Red Hat installer has its owm tools for creating the relevant partitions and filesystems.

To install Red Hat or any distribution you atleast need a

Root partition and Swap partition.

Are you trying to Dual boot Red Hat 9 and Windows 2000 on the same 120 gig drive?

Yes, I intend to make it a dual boot machine with win2k and rh9. As of right now the drive is set up with a main storage partition (C drive), Win2k files partition (E drive), and the partition I created for Linux, the H drive. My 80gb drive is the D and my cdrw drive and virtual cdrom drive take up F and G. Do I need to delete the H partition, and if I do would redhat installation work then?

Hi Scoughlin

Just a suggestion - but why dont you have :

Win2k on 120 gig as Primary master /dev/hda - think of it as your 1st hard drive

contaning :

/dev/hda1 - - NTFS partition for your main Win2k install
/dev/hda2 - - FAT32 partition to be used as a Shared data partition


Red Hat 9 on 80 gig Primary Slave /dev/hdb - think of it as your 2nd hard drive

I have tried installing rh9 on the 80gb drive but I get the same error as when I try to install on the 120gb, but the 80gb is not partitioned so I don't know whats the problem.

Hi Scoughlin

Are you trying to Manually partition from the Red Hat installer by any chance?

Sometimes you'll get a Boot constraints error from Red Hat if it doesnt agree with the Manuall partitioning youve created.

For starters its easier to let it Automatically install into some free space

After trying again, Linux wanted to create a partition on my 80gb drive but couldn't for some reason. It said it could do it after I formatted the drive completely, so I suppose I will transfer data to my other drive then format.

Did you want to create the Dual boot on the Same hard drive or on 2 hard drives?

Either way - we can help

If there's any existing partitions on any of your drives just choose the option "delete all existing partitions" - make sure you back up what you want first - you won;t need to format it as such - Red Hat can just delete the previous partitions to create free space then it will create new Linux partitions ready for the Red Hat install.

Well I had originally intended to dual boot from the same hard drive but the 120gb already has 3 sections, one for storage, one for Win2k and another that I created for linux. Would I have to delete all the partitions, format, reinstall Win2k, then install linux? That is what I'm trying to avoid at all costs since it would be so time consuming. I just assume formatting the 80gb would be easier since I wouldn't have to possibly reinstall Win2k.

Hi Scoughlin

No - just install Red Hat onto the 80 gig drive

Is it on primary slave or secondary master?

Make sure you install either LILO or GRUB to the MBR

The 80gb is currently the primary slave since I heard it was better to not have a hard drive and cdrw drive on the same "channel" or whatever it's called. Does it need to be the secondary master?

Hi Scoughlin

No - Primary Slave is fine

Linux will see your Primary slave 80 gig drive as

/dev/hdb

so in the install let Red Hat automatically partition and install on /dev/hdb

Install either LILO or GRUB to the MBR - I prefer LILO - if you want to use LILO click on the "Change bootloader" button at the top when the relevant screen comes up - install LILO to the MBR