Problem Installing into Triple Boot Environment
 

I am very new to Linux, but would really like to learn it. I already had Xandros 3, then I bought a "Linux for Dummies" that came with Red Hat 8. My goal is to run Win XP and Xandros, but I want to run Red Hat to use while I work through that book. Here is what I have and have done so far.

I have two hard drives: a 250GB SATA drive (which I am making the primary drive) and a 40GB SATA drive. First, on the 250GB SATA drive I installed Win XP. Second, I split the 40GB SATA drive in half and installed Xandros and created its Swap partition, but I installed its boot manager (LILO) onto the 250GB drive. In this state, the Xandros boot loader allows me to choose to run Xandros or Win XP. My third step is to install Red Hat, its Swap partition, and its boot loader onto the remaining space of the 40GB drive. I am able to go through the Red Hat installation guide when I boot to the CD. Being a newbie, I chose to use the graphical installation. I used Druid to format most of the remaining space for Red Hat and its Swap, which was added as an extension. By the way, would Xandros and Red Hat need separate Swap partitions, or should I have only one Swap partition on the whole drive? The default boot manager for Red Hat is Grub, but I have the option to use LILO. I told it to use LILO since that is what Xandros uses and that is what I am booting to. I finally got to the point to let it do the installation. I accepted all the setting and told it to install. The CD started going and after a few minutes a progress bar for formatting popped up and immediately slid up about ⅛ of the installation. Then it stopped and I heard the CD slow down; I actually let it sit all night and it never moved beyond that point. I tried it two times. With the first attempt I made some slight changes with some of the options. With the second, I left all the options as they were, figuring I could make changes once it was installed. The only thing I did change both times was telling it to use LILO instead of Grub. I don’t think that this has anything to do with it though since it never got past the formatting.

Could someone please give me some input as to what might be the problem? Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for reading this somewhat long post and thanks in advance for the input.

Red Hat Linux (RHL) 8.0 is dead* and never had the proper support for SATA hard drives.

Dead as in nobody supports it, Red Hat ended support years ago. If you want to stay with the Red Hat family then have a look at Fedora Core 5 or CentOS 4.4 both are based on Red Hat Linux. FC5 (or switching back to the old naming RHL14) and CentOS 4.4 is a freely available binary compatible with RHEL4 update 4 (which is the latest). Both will work with your "Dummies" book mostly in either case.

Thanks for the reply Lenard. I'll look into that.

Hey, just wanted to let you know that I downloaded Fedora Core 5, installed it, and so far everything is working without a hitch. For the moment, I now have a triple boot system up and running.

Thanks Lenard.

Your welcome, it is good to know that you have your system triple booting.

FC5 is OK to use, presonally I would have done CentOS, but since it is your system enjoy!!