I am trying to load RH (6.0 and 7.x) on my Dell Inspiron 8000, 20Gb H/D, 512RAM, nVidia card)

Anyhow, when I try and load the 7.x versions, everyting goes along fine until it reboots itself after the load. Once this happens, I get a Kernel panic everytime... I'm at a loss here on even where to start...

So, I decided to go all the way back to 6.0 and give that a shot, thinking that if it loaded, then I'll just upgrade until I get at the version that I desire....

Welllll- When I try and load 6.0, LILO fails and I get "LI" all the way down the left hand side of the screen...

What's the problem here? What am I doing wrong?

help would be appreciated.


-TDI

You probably know this, but how much of the word 'lilo' that LILO prints is how far it got in loading.

For some good Lilo info: http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/a1439.html

LI means that the second stage of the bootloader failed to execute but loaded, so it may be too many things to guess right now. If you posted what the kernel panicked on in the 7x install that might help. Most importantly: can you get RH started with a boot disk? If so, its probably just a matter of tweaking your lilo.conf

Oh, and btw, 512Meg of RAM in a Laptop! That's hardcore dude.

Luck,

Finegan

I guess the thing that confuses me is that I have problems with any flavor of RH.

As for the boot disk, when I've tried to make the boot disk while I'm loading the OS, the system wont make it at all. I get some sort of error that I cant remember right now off the top of my head.

Do you think that this might be a HD problem?

-TDI

Poking around with Google I couldn't find any specific oddities with Dell Inspirons and Linux, which is what I expected, which is what makes this issue more confounding. The biggest thing I can figure is if you can find a way to get a kernel to mount that hard drive at all, then its not the hard drive. I know there's a way to just make a simple bootdisk from the redhat CDs via a windows box using rawrite.exe, but the easiest I can think of <current distro pref> is to use Slackware's bare.i

It'll prompt after unpacking the kernel image, but before booting it what drive you would like to mount. </current distro pref>

Also, track down the big explanation of LILO errors. LI scrolling down the screen has an exact problem associated with it, which hopefully is understandable to someone other than a kernel hacker. I had a big fight with LILO once too, and it turned out to be something simple I was doing wrong in BIOS, so I wouldn't blame the hardware just yet.

Oh, and another shot might be to get a copy of tomsrtbt, a distro that fits on a single floppy, and then mount /dev/hda1 and see if you can manually edit your lilo.conf and then re-run LILO.

If Dell had only kept their pre-loaded Linux business up. Twerps.

Hope that helps,

-Finegan