Crashes while reinstalling Red Hat 7.2
 

Hello fine people,

I finally converted my old P133 rig to Linux, I've got Red Hat 7.2 burned to two CDs and the first install went very well (except not enough memory to run the graphical install, no biggie).

Thing is, in my newbie-haze I installed X, GNOME, KDE etc. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it barely ran the GUI and X was just taking up WAY too much room and boot time.

At any rate, since I'm using this thing as a gateway/web server I could care less about the GUI and after a few days of trying to remove it I decided to simply reinstall the OS. Well, I basically booted to the RH CD, and after a few tries (it crashed while loading, something about anaconda and spit out the CD) I did '' and proceeded to delete all linux partitions and repartition. Okay, everything was fine and then WHAMMO right in the middle of copying files (actually while copying something described as 'files for basic system functions', or something to that effect), it crashed out again, dumped the registers to the screen, locked up and I swear I saw something about code 11 or somewhere in there. I used LILO instead of GRUB too, if that makes a difference.

I apologize for not having the gritty details, this was last night and I'm not around my system now.

I'm going to try this again tonight, should I format the drive first? What should I use? Any ideas?!?! Please help I'm linux moron!!

Thx

Anybody?

I did it all over again tonight and it crashed again, this time at 428 of 429MB. It printed this out, skewed across the screen:

install exited abnormally received signal 11

Then it sent termination signal and unmounted everything.

It was installing a different package altogether this time:
sudo-1.6.3p7-2
'Allows restricted root access for specified users'

Maybe my HDD is toast, but it worked FINE the first time!!
Hope that might clear it up some anyway, thanks for your time :)

I've seen this happen for two reasons: bad memory/memory errors and weird hard drive partitions. But the second was on old kernels... so I doubt that is the problem.

Linux will blow up on you in a heartbeat if you have memory errors. Try reseating your RAM, etc. or if you have some laying around, try it. You might roll your eyes at me :D but it've seen it to many times to count, on not only Linux, but on Solaris as well.

Thanks ryanstrayer, I'm lost with this one! If it is a memory error I'm outta luck becuase these SIMMs are way overpriced now.

It did crash the first time I was re-partitioning so that could have caused some problems. I'll probably run fail-safe settings in my BIOS and try the reinstall again, possibly with just one of the HDDs if it doesn't work.

Thx again :)

Well ever time Linux bombs on an install like that, it's usually a hardware issue of some type. But yes, if you have a way of wiping the partitions from your drive and making new ones, outside of linux, I'd try that.. get a clean partition table.

I've seen issue with HDs and partition tables on older systems, for what reason, I have yet to figure out .. but a guy I knew had to dratically reduce the size of his partitions to get it to work right.. it might of been a BIOS issue...?

Well I got it installed. I disabled my second HDD in BIOS and installed to the primary, everything went fine. Actually one crash after the install at the first boot prompt but that was it... I think this computer is just too old ;)

Thank you for your help!