System hangs during floppy boot (RH 7.2 - newbie)
 

Hello,

I have a Win XP (Home) system with which I made the last 7.5G of the HD free for Linux. Installed Red Hat 7.2 from the CDs, and everything seemed fine - install completed without issue. During the install I had it do the partitioning for me and make a boot disk, as I chose to install GRUB in the partition and not in the MBR.

Booting w/o a boot disk goes right into XP, as planned. However, when I boot off of this floppy disk, it starts RedHat normally and then hangs after saying [OK] to two lines referring to USB. No error messages, no disk activity, it just sits there.

I don't know if it's the USB that's at fault or whatever comes up next in line to start, but it halts there every time. Does anyone have any ideas as to what the problem may be?

I'm thinking of reinstalling from scratch using LILO, as that's more documented as far as what I've seen via my web searches. Dunno if that will help the boot process tho, worried even more that it might do more harm than good.

The only thing I can think of trying right now is to disable USB in the BIOS and see if that has anything to do with anything, but I've read that Linux really doesn't depend too much on BIOS anyways so...

Thanks in advance,

JL :)

It's the USB
 

Aww crap...

I disabled the USB in the BIOS and it booted up... sorta. It failed the USB part that it OKed before (duh) but wouldn't boot into X. Logging in and running startx got me a big error that pretty much said "without your USB mouse around, we won't let you in".

(I'd love to be able to know how to fix this via the CLI, but i also would like to browse the internet simultaniously in Gnome or something while i'm doing so! In the meantime, i'm back in XP.)

OK, now i know WHAT is specifically causing the problem, does anyone have any ideas as to how i can clear it up?

The USB is on the motherboard AND on a separate expansion slot. I'm gonna try to pull the expansion ports and just try it with the mobo ports.

Thanks,

JL

I'm in
 

Greetings from Gnome-land! :D

Ok, I pulled the expansion USB ports and I'm in RedHat no problem. (Now I just gotta figure out how to get myself to dual boot and decide which desktop manager I like better - but that's a WHOLE different thread - ha ha)

Still, if anyone has any good ideas on how to get those USB ports back (I've lost them for both XP and Linux now that I had to pull them) I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks,

JL