I recently purchased Red Hat 9 and have once again experienced the usual (for me) fault. When I reboot after the install (Red Hat 9 only) the following halt occurs complete with a locked computer.

“Ide0 at 0x1f0 – 0x1f7, 0x3f6 on irq 14
Ide1 at 0x170 – 0x177, 0x376 on irq 15
_ “

I currently have an HP Pavilion 752n, 60 MHz Hard Drive, 512 Mbytes RAM w/CD-RW, DVD, Floppy, and a Zip Drive. However, the above identical fault has occurred on other computers and with other linux distributions. Each time that I write I am asked many irrelevant questions about the components in my setup. I haven’t always had a 60 MHz Hard Drive, nor 512 Mbytes of RAM, or a CD-RW, DVD or a Zip Drive. Granted the computer checks for the component population prior to booting. But, I have always had the failure depicted above. As I attempt to think my way through this problem I am convinced that there are only two common denominators me or Linux. Because, I am new to Linux, the fickle finger of fate seems to point at me. This problem occurs in other computers and in other distributions of Linux, and, because I don’t survive a boot up is it possible that my problem is in CMOS? Do special requirements exist for Linux computers that are not required of Windows?

I retired in 1991 and my past experience is primarily with DOS and Windows 3.1, I have used 95, 98, Me and now XP at home, with no brains to pick when I encounter problems. I would really like to join the Linux community, (i.e., get rid of Bill Gates), but, with a computer that is always dead in the water, it’s beginning to look as though I’m stuck with Redmond. My latest venture is an attempt to dual-boot Red-Hat-9 and Windows XP, the installation reported that I needed to defragment my hard disk in order to continue with Linux loading. I defragmented and went back to the Linux installation and was informed that I needed to defragment my hard disk. I feel as though I am in a maze. Can anyone offer any suggestion? I will gladly accept a Linux only installation.

When I load Linux only “Remove all partitions on this system” I cannot get past the failure noted above. When I attempt to dual boot with Windows XP “Keep all partitions and use existing free space” I am continuously directed to defragment. Have I chosen the best (for a newbie) distribution? I have copies of Red Hat and Mandrake. Should I look

I do not know of any specific BIOS settings required to get Linux to boot correctly. As for Which Distro to choose, RedHat and Mandrake are probably the 2 easiest to use. The 'defrag' option usually shows up in RedHat install because it needs to shrink your current partition (XP in your case) to make room for new partitions for Linux. This process does not always work as expected, especially if you are short on room on your existing partition.

You said that you have a 60 GigaByte drive (you actually said mhz, but I assume you mean GB), with WinXP already installed. Is the entire drive formatted as one partition? If so, your best bet would probably be to back up your existing XP install, remove all partitions from the drive, and then to create a partition specifically for XP that is only 10 or 15 GB in size. It may be easier to just reinstall XP from scratch at this point (after all, a fresh install can sometimes be a good thing), and leave the remaining space unpartitioned so that you can go through the RedHat install and create new linux partitions from scratch.

Hope that helps.

slight