Hi,
Looking for a little help or direction here. Im a computer science major and part of my course is to learn linux. Well I bought a course book that came with a copy of Red Hat linux 9.0 enterprise edition. I have a spare comptuer (AMD-WindowsXP-yada,yada,yada) that I installed RH linux on(in a dual boot environment). Installation went smooth everything installed with no errors(actualy, one error said something about the /boot during install, not sure im at school right now so I cant see but if that seems like a major problem I can reinstall and see what it says again, but it said I could continue installation anyways.) So I restarted the computer after successful install-got the LILO screen-selected Redhat Linux 9.0-then all hell broke loose. Lots of white text on a black screen and at the bottom I got this error. "Spurious 8259A interrup: IRQ7 Kernel panic: attempted to kill init!"

Did 4 consecutive reinstalls of linux with different settings for my Peripherial devices(mouse, video, yada,yada) and all install fine but the same error appears everytime when I try to boot linux. Mind you windows boots fine everytime.

Quick question when I formated windows I have a 40g h-d and I NTFS'd 20g's of it and left the other 20g's as a free partition not formated. So when I start windows all you see is (C:\ = 20g, and then of course the other 20g's is not visible since I left it unformated. Question being was I supposed to let windows format that in a certain format that linux could see? or does the linux install format that on its own? Becuase it found it in the install program and installed to it.

Well thats pretty much it. Any help, insight, flames would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
P.S if you need more info let me know I'll see what I can do.

First, there is no such thing as Red Hat Linux 9 Enterprise it is Red hat Linux 9 and it has been EOL'd for more then 2 years (EOL == end of life == not supported)

Second you hardware description is lacking you might find that reading this to be helpful in the future;

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...Ask_a_Question

Third the default bootloader for RHL9 is grub not lilo, you might have selected lilo during the installation process but that is not important.

Finally, like I said RHL9 is no longer supported. I'm glad you got as far as installation but you should really be using a modern supported Linux OS, if staying with the Red Hat family consider the Fedora Core 5 or 6 version or the CentOS or Scientific Linux 3 or 4 version. Both the last two are freely available work alike binary compatible clones of RHEL 3 or 4 (the real enterprise version of Linux by Red Hat) respectfully.

http://www.centos.org/
http://fedora.redhat.com/
https://www.scientificlinux.org/

If this AMD CPU on your system is a 64-bit processor then it might be advisable to download and install the 64-bit version of the OS.

Reinstalling Linux unlike Windows is not needed most of the time (about 99% of the time BTW). From your description of the problem most likely your hardware is far to new to be properly supported by Red Hat Linux 9 kernel.