Ok here it is I recently installed a 18gb hard drive and installed windows 98 se on half of it the next 9.5gb is free space. As for the partitoning of this drive I made a swap partition 300mb and the remainder of the drive and use for the root. Does this sound right since I'll be the only user? Well here is my problem it would start installing and about 3-5 minutes into the installation it would give me an error about can't define keyboard description well that is the only one i have been able to see so far there was another but i wasn't able to see the cause of the error I believe it was about istallation was abnormally interupted or something.

Your help would greatly appreciated so that i can can get this dual boot system up and running. A step by step procedure would be nice if possible because it is being a pain installing red hat 7.2

Switch to Mandrake. Installation and configuring your system is really easy. The installation program asks you to define and configure your mouse, keyboard etc. while installing. And it is practically impossible to partition your hd wrong.

Red Hat does the same. If you're having problems doing the standard installation, try an expert install (type expert at the boot: prompt to start.) Tell it you don't have a driver disk and off you go. Expert mode will enable you to skip certain "sanity" code that will stop you at the first install error.

Also, what kind of keyboard are you using? You may want to switch out to a standard keyboard for the installation. If you're trying to use a USB or IR keyboard for installation, I wouldn't try it. Stick with AT or PS/2.

I don't understand why everybody here is complaining about installing Red Hat 7.2
I installed it myself recently and I had no trouble at all. I just followed the instructions in the manual (that I had printed before) and all went well. So here is my advice to:
Print the manual
Follow the instructions
Use Red Hat !

Hang on, did you install a boot partition of 16MB?

There are three basic parts to a linux installation, whatever the distribution:

/ root partition (ext3fs/ext2fs) - your files go here
/boot boot partition (ext3fs / ext2fs) - makes root partition bootbale
<swap> swap partition - usually twice you system RAM up to 128MB.

All new distributions should walk you through installation with very little need for tweaking or guesswork.

Your Linux OS was free but I strongly suggest spending the equivalent on books! You can have a free lunch as long as you sing for it

Learning Red Hat Linux

Bert