Installation halts ....

I am attempting to install 8.1 onto a barebones PC (400Mhz Celeron, 20Gb HD, 256Mb RAM, SiS AGP Graphics card, floppy and CDRom).

For some reason my BIOS doesnt look to the CDROM at bootup (even though Ive configured it to do so!) so I have created a boot floppy.

Most of the time the installation process gets past the Yast 'proposal' stage and starts installing the software. But at what would appear to be at a random point (because its different each time I attempt an install) the installation halts and the keyboards CAPS LOCK and SCROLL LOCK flash.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This sounds like a dodgy hardware issue. Try another distro (redhat 8 is good) and see if something similar happens.

I read in another thread that if a couple of distros have the same problem, its probably a hardware prob.

Any suggestions about how I can determine what the hardware problem is ..?

Freezing can be caused by several things. Try Red Hat or Mandrake.