I have a Pentium III 450 with 768 meg of RAM with Red Hat 9.0 on it. It is using an Adaptec 2120S Raid controller with 4 SCSI 34 GB HDs in hardware RAID 5 mode. There are 3 partitions on the logical drive. /boot on /dev/sda1 (ext3), / on /dev/sda2 (ext3) and swap on /dev/sda3.

This machine was a Netware Server and has been converted to Linux A clean new install of Linux Red Hat 9.0 was installed. This is and will be the only OS on this system.

Since the install, the system will not load the linux image. It does see and load Grub. I can make changes to Grub and have tried several thing, all to no avail. The system seems to hang almost immediately after hitting enter or b to boot. The drives show a very quick I/O (the light on one drive blinks once). The screen shows the image as loading and then nothing. It sits there hung.

If I boot using the Red Hat Install Disk 1 CD and go in to rescue mode, I can see both of the ext3 partitions and can manipulate them as I wish. I have compared grub.conf and as well as the /boot directory structure to a good running machine. The directory holds the same files and directories and the images have the same date and size.

My search on the web has given me few useful leads and those that I tried did not work. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks.

Hello there and welcome to LQ, hope you like it here.

Probably not what you want to hear but since running GNU/Linux is all about performance, protecting assets and providing services in a continuous, stable and secure way you must know Red Hat Linux maintenance and errata support ended on April 30 of 2004 for all YES ALL Red Hat Linux releases (not RHEL) so unless you're a seasoned admin and need to worry about legacy applications you should consider running a distribution that is maintained and supported instead of RHL9. If you like what RHEL provides but don't want to pay for it you could run CentOS. If you like what RHL provided then you could run Fedora Core. Else check out the many "choose a distro" threads here.