Well how do I start...

I do not meant to complain, however installing linux has proven to be much more of a handful than I had expected... I love what I have seen off of the slax bootable disk... with kde desktop; first off I am dealing with this for a setup...

originally I started out with...
300 mhz P2
96 mg ram
/dev/hda/ 4.3gig
/dev/hdb/ 40 gig
slow cd rom - 12x
100 mb zip drive
(was an old micron machine) from 1998(olde but a goody - worked just fine with windows...unfortunately) with a few updates!!

I have downloaded several distrubutions of linux to lista few--

-mandrake 10.1(hangs when checking memory)

-suse 9.1(hangs during installlation at the part of "loading into memory" cd rom sounds like it is going to "lick the cd to death" slurp slurp.. no buzz from hard drive during this process.

-peanut linux?(claims bad boot)

-knoppix(aieee!!! kernel problems)

Vector linux - was going fine it would load linux(show penguin) but would crash in xfee....many other things going wrong

Now my cdrom wont show up in my bios,

eliminated one hard drive...

Point being...
Need help with this...

I want to clean my hard drive...
finding an easy to use distrobution to install with an appropiate desktop for my pc

if linux works on this pc then the sky is the limit.....


Kirk

I'm sorry to be bearer of bad news there is a good chance you either
1. have bad ram
or
2. CDROM is on a Bad IDE channel or is itself had it.

1st if your lucky it's the cdrom being a bitch find another one and plug into a different IDE channel on you motherboard.

but if you can't fix that / there's no spare parts
What version of Mandrake 10.1 you have?
if it is Community
look for the Official version

But many believe that Slackware is the fastest for old computers, but the installer is a fair bit more difficult then the easy wizard mandrake provides.

I have set up the old pc bare bones as follows..

different (but not new) cd rom/burner
floppy drive
1 hard drive... not sure on size... 6gigs....
300mhz p2 processor

all of the previously mentioned distros got further into their installations before crapping out.. this time giving official messages.... no specific mesages of importance though linux's rich cousin helped me get the distros.\

many burnt cd's down perhaps many to go...

I think your memory might be shot, because all the distros crap out when Memory would be near maximum capacity, except peanut.

You might look into using Memtest86. It's a stand-alone memory tester. You download it, burn it to CD, stick in the drive and reboot. I serously doubt that it's a problem with your CD-ROM drive or IDE channel because you can load the Linux installers.

Just out of curiosity.......

Can I get an explanation for this....

with the partitioning program "parted" it sees only a FAT partion.....

with "CFDISK" it sees only a linux partition....


I know I may get shot for this but.... Is there such a thing as a utility that will partition and format my hard drives...ideally I would love to see a pie chart, a grapical picture of what is going on with my hard drive so I can see and adjust accordingly...im not a dumbass but im sure drawing a blank..... i thought the distros I was using had such a thing, I believe they do but they are the most annoying things I have seen.

I threw slax in and looked around for such a utility.. but I didnt find anything. maybe I am blind.

Maybe I'm biting off more than I can chew here.

kirk

If you have windows, you might try Partition Magic if you can afford it. It costs about $70, but it works like a charm.

I FINALLY GOT IT TO WORK!!!!!!!!!

Suse 9.1 Looks sweet..

i THINK THE PROBLEM WAS WITH MY DOWNLOADS.....

I finally smartened up and started checking my md5sums...... had a bad disk
re downloaded and reburnt..

found a hard disk utility for the big hard drive from the manufactured and reformatted accordingly... then was able to install suse9.1 yeah yeah .
Except their are windows partitions on it...yes when suse recommended partions for the hd
I thought i told it to erase all windows parts geuss it didnt.

Installing suse on another hard drive as I type takes 2 hrs!!! I just used suse to reformat and part I hope it all workks well

Out of curiosity Is there any GIS (geographical information sytem) software available for linux?

thanks for all the help...

ive heard of and installed Grass on my slackware, and thats what they use for gis on the local uni.. So that might be worth a shot.. (: