Cheers all,

I had no problem installing RH 6.1 and 6.2, however, installing RH 7.1 on my Compaq 4210T is only slightly problematic. It seems that RH 7.1 probes the ide while booting and times-out 4 times before disabling DMA and continuing.

I have a feeling this is corrupting the filesystem since I can only run X/Gnome twice before X/Gnome hangs on initilaztion (and per user, oddly enough) thereafter.

I've tried lilo append (idebus=33) but it does the exact same thing.

I think the last option I have is to recompile the kernel without DMA support.

I've read several linux newbie articles regarding config/recompiling the kernel, but I would highly appreciate a more solid and specific suggestion to my situation..

Thanks in advance.