I may have figured out the issue but not sure. I'm trying to install again and the last time I looked at it it had 230 packages out of 669 installed. If this works I know what was wrong and it's a poor boy issue.

We Have LINUX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well I should have figured this out a long time ago, but I didn't. The things I changed to make this work are. I totally wiped the hard drive and only installed Linux instead of the dual boot. I don't think the dual boot had anything to do with the problem but will test it out when I have more time. The problem as I see it is (and I can't believe you guys didn't see it either) that I had 384 meg of RAM and we know that Windows is not as tempremental as Linux when it comes to memory because windows alot of times uses Virtual memory. Well that probably doesn't matter anyway. The problem or at least I think the problem was that the 384 meg of RAM was a stick of 256meg and two sticks of 64 meg and these were not all matched. It ran fine on my Windows but wouldn't let me do the complete install of Red Hat 9.

So now I have learned a lesson , and better yet I don't have to depend on the lab to do my UNIX/Linux homework, I can sit at home bare naked (scary mental image) and do whatever I need here.

Any way to all that responded to my Thread I want to thank you very much and let you know I truly do appreciate it.


Stoney

Did you remove any memory? This is generally a hardware dependant thing. Some motherboards (specifically MSI and Gigagbyte in my experience) are very fussy about memory quality and sometimes only run with identical memory sticks. You can check your memory with memtest86. It is available in most Linux distros and as a DOS format as well and runs off a floppy.

To answer your question Yes, I did remove the two sticks of 64meg and just left the single stick of 256meg. Linux is running fine so when I get time I'm going to try the dual boot thing all over and I'm sure it will work.

Once again thanks for all your replies

stoney

Glad to help and good luck. Hope you enjoy Linux as much as I do.

Pleasure matey!

I did the following, starting off with bare iron, i.e. a virgin machine with nothing on the HDD, not even DOS.

1. Boot from the floppy into DOS / Windows text mode. (I. e. a floppy created with format A: /s on another Windows machine). Partition the HDD into one large Primary Dos Partition using DOS fdisk (off the floppy) and make the partition active.

2. Format the HDD. format C: /s /u

3. The boot floppy mentioned in (1) was tuned so that it loaded the MSCDEX drivers so I can read CDs in DOS mode.

4. Copy Win98 files off the Win98 CD onto the HDD.

5. Run Win98 setup from DOS.

6. After Win98 is installed, boot again with the floppy from step (1).

7. Get out the Red Hat Linux CD#1.

8. Run fips on CD#1 in the /dosutils directory.

9. Skrink the Win98 partition by 10GB so that Windows has 30GB on my disk and Linux 10GB.

10. Exit fips, reboot again from floppy.

11. Again use Red Hat Linux CD#1, run fips again and split the 10GB partition into a 9.55GB partition and a 0.5GB partition - this is for the swap partition for Linux.

12. NOTE - Steps 8 - 11 will only work if you've got a suffieciently old BIOS. On my old mobo, step 8- 11 worked fine, but on my new one, FIPS refuses to partition the disk. FIPS uses BIOS calls, so I guess on newer motherboards step 11 won't work - new boards have newer BIOSes. If you can't use fips you need to partition the disk into the required 3 paritions BEFORE formatting to install Windows for the first time.

13. Boot from Linux CD#1 in the CDROM drive.

14. When prompted, partition manually. Assign / to hda2 (the 10GB partition) and /swap to hda3 (the 0.5GB partition). Swap memory seems to need to be the same size as physical memory, or twice that? Can't remember.

15. When prompted, install GRUB in the primary boot sector. Make sure you select to "Force LBA" with the the bootloader installation.

16. Finish Linux install.

17. Reboot. You can now choose between Windows and Linux.

PS - This worked fine for me for about two years over three re-installs with a Gigabyt 8-IRML motherboard with a P4 1.8gHz CPU and 512MB of RAM, and 40GB Seagate HDD.

Hope this helped!