I've tried to install Mandrake 9 and Red Hat 8 and on both of the installs the system hangs on hda: of the partition check. I've tried installing about 10 time with these two and they do it every time. I've also re-downloaded the ISOs for the 2 OSs too. It still hangs. Lycoris, Win98, and Win2K will install ok on this system.

Anyone have any ideas about what's going on? I need some help bad. This is very frustrating.

I even formatted the drive with fat and ran SpinRite 5 on the drive. There's nothing wrong with the drive according to SpinRite.

You can imagine my frustration after downloading 2 sets of ISOs for two OSs and running SpinRite. So many hours spent on this, and so little to show for it...

I only used Fat so that I could run SpinRite on the drive to check it. This is a test machine so there isn't anything important on it. It's been my experience that the installer offers to partition the drive for you when it gets going. The installer hanges before it gets to that point. In fact the only thing on the screen is text. I tell it to use the graphical install, but appearently it has to run some comand line stuff before it gets to the graphical part. It hangs during this pre-graphic stage. It looks as if it's some sort of POST. It's just telling me what is in the machine.

Just before the partition check there is something like this:
hda: WDC 1234567, ATA Disk drive
hdc: Plextor CD-R, ATAPI CD/DVD drive
ide0: at 0x12345 on IRQ 14
ide1 at 0x45678 on irq 15
hda: 40079088 sectors with 2000KB cache, UDMA(33)
hdc: ATAPI CDROM drive 4000MB cache
Uniform CD Rom Driver revision 1234567
ide Floppy driver Revisoin 99
Partition Check
hda:

that is for the RedHat install, but the Mandrake install is something almost identical to that.

Well, I'm trying to install RedHat right now. I get the original redhat graphic with the choice to press F1 for one option or another F# for something else, or I can press enter for a normal install. I just press enter, then shortly after it hangs on the partition check.

On Mandrake, I get the innitial Mandrake graphic with the option of pressing F1 for more options or pressing enter to install. I have tried pressing enter, I have tried pressing F1 then expert, and I have tried pressing F1 and linux. All give the same results. Which is it starts to load, then hangs on the partition check

It even hangs with the noprob option and the rescue option...

How long does it hang for?
Is PnP disabled on BIOS?
How many Hds do you have?

Pass the following kernel option at the boot prompt

boot: linux pci=off

If that does not work try

boot: linux pci=off nomce

There is only one HD. I use the word hang, rather than lock up because it seems like it's in a loop or something. The numlcok still responds, so it's not completly frozen. But it hangs indefinatly. PnP is DISABLED in BIOS.

I'll try passing those parameters to the installer in a few minutes.

Ok, well linux pci=off did the trick on the installation cd. But now that RedHat is installed, it hangs at the same point during the normal boot process.

Would you please explain what pci=off does and why the boot process doesn't hang when I use it. Or alternatly why the boot process does hang when I don't use it. Does it have anything to do with why my NIC and sound card weren't auto-installed?

It would also be very helpful if you would tell me how to make the system boot with that option permanently... but then again if I can't acess the network, the workstation will be pretty useless anyway.

*bump*

so how to set this option linux pci=off everytime system boots