Redhat Linux 9 does not boot after clean install
 

Hi there, I just tried installing RH Linux 9. I booted from CD1 but it would not work in graphics mode so I installed in text mode. From that point on it was smooth sailing till the end. Loaded "Everything" with all default settings. At the very end it detected an ATI Rage 128 but I changed that to an All-In-Wonder Pro 128 AGP even though I only have an all in wonder 128. Rebooted and the only thing it says once the software takes over from the BIOS before the computer hangs is "GRUB" so looks like it tries starting the GRUB loader and stops. Perhaps it has not even gotten to trying to load the vid card driver so maybe that has nothing to do with it.

I'm a total newbie and this is the first time installing Linux so I'm not sure where to go from here. I did a search around the internet but could not find anything similar to my problem. Anyway I can get back in and change the vid driver or look at a log file to see where it's hanging? Any ideas what my problem might be?

The install was a clean install to an empty hardrive. Hardware as follows

Pentium IIIE 1Gig Coppermine 133FSB
MSI 815E PRO Motherboard
ATI Rage 128GL (ATI All-In-Wonder 128)
2 x 128Meg SDRAM
80Gig Maxtor IDE HD on Primary Master (Windows XP Pro boot disk)
30Gig IBM IDE HD on Primary Slave (Linux 9 boot disk using GRUB)
Sony CD-RW on Primary Slave
Hitachi DVD-ROM on Secondary Slave

Which OS I boot to is selected by Boot order in BIOS

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Im also a newbie user, but I had the same problem when I loaded RH 9 on my computer. You can try this, it worked for me, but it may not work, I don't know much about what I'm doing. I reinstalled Linux, but I installed the boot loader on the primary drive (with Windows XP). This makes it so you always boot off the primary HD instead of using BIOS to switch between primary and secondary, and then a screen pops up every time you boot that asks you which OS you want to boot into.

If someone else reads this and sees something wrong with what I said, please say something, I'm sorta drawing conclusions on a couple things, but I think its right.

Thanks yzrider210,

Unfortunately, what you suggest is not an option. I don't want to mess with my XP drive at all. I want 2 completely independent drives with different OS's. I don't see any reason for it not to work that way but with Linux, who knows.

What you could do is to setup a /boot partition on the drive where you have installed Linux, once you install GRUB on that partition, you can always boot with GRUB and choose to start with linux or windows without messing up anything in windows. If you want more details, I can tell you how.

Thanks for the suggestion aeruzcar. First I would like to know why I cant boot the way it is now. I used the Autopartition feature in RH Linux 9 and remember that it did create a boot partion. I can't even get past that. Setting up a dual boot scenario should come only after I figure out what is happening so far no?

I really don't know why it happens that. When I started Using linux I started out with redhat, it always made trouble with the partitions, so I quit using redhat.

Boot problem
 

Well i have a boot problem with redhat 9 too, i have installed it completly and fully and on a clean 7200 rpm Wesern digital hard drive, and it will open grub start to boot then stop with a bunch of words sitting there.

My computer is running on a MSI pt880 board with a 1mb cache prescott P4 and 512mb of corsair extreme ram and ati 7500 pro video card.

I dont know why it wont boot cause i am kinda a newbie for linux os's.

If someone can help id appreciate it.

this is what comes up theres other hard ware stuff but, then it says this

up_ide: ide controller at r1 slot:00:0f.1
up_ide: chipset version 6
up_ide: 100% unknown mode: wil probe irgs later
up_ide: Unknown VIA southbridge, disabling DMA
then it stops here

what does this mean