Have you tried booting the latest errata install disks? You can get them here: ftp://angus.ind.wpi.edu/pub/updates/7.2/en/os/images/i386/boot.img ftp://angus.ind.wpi.edu/pub/updates/7.2/en/os/images/i386/update-disk-20020117.img Make sure you rawrite/dd them to brand new floppy disks, since if there is even a single byte error on the floppy disk, the install will fail. Boot the first one (boot.img) and see below... On Tue, Jun 25, 2002 at 06:25:44PM -0400, Hemstreet, Jeffrey wrote: jhemstreet> One is an HP Vectra (2Gb IDE, 56MB, P200). I can fdisk and select jhemstreet> packages, but when it goes to jhemstreet> format the disk to install the packages, I get a signal 11 fatal error. I jhemstreet> think there may be something jhemstreet> flaky with this system (HDD or memory problem?) Just wondering if anyone jhemstreet> else has seen this type jhemstreet> of failure and could give me any more insight. I plan on replacing the HDD jhemstreet> to see if that is the problem. It depends. Does the signal 11 always happen at exactly the same point? If so, that doesn't necessarily point to flakey hardware, but rather a software bug. If it IS random, then it does sound like a memory error. You can test your RAM with memtest86, available here: http://www.memtest86.com/ Another thing you can try is making sure the amount of memory is detected correctly by Linux (check the boot up messages of the Linux kernel). If not, you can force the correct amount by appending the mem option to the linux boot command line: linux updates mem=56M You need the "updates" bit to use the update-disk mentioned earlier. Insert the updates disk when it asks. jhemstreet> The other is a dual-300 PII HP Kayak with a SCSI Drive. I get a boot error jhemstreet> when trying to boot from the jhemstreet> CDROM or Install Disk. This system is currently running NT 5. Any ideas jhemstreet> why the boot would fail? Bad floppy disk and/or CD-ROM? How did you acquire your Red Hat 7.2 CD-ROM? If it isn't an official disk, then it might have been burned incorrectly. Red Hat recommends burning ISO's in Disk-At-Once mode, and checking the images and disks with md5sum to be sure they burned correctly. -- Charles R. Anderson / http://angus.ind.wpi.edu/~cra/ PGP Key ID: 49BB5886 Fingerprint: EBA3 A106 7C93 FA07 8E15 3AC2 C367 A0F9 49BB 5886

On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, Hemstreet, Jeffrey wrote:

The other is a dual-300 PII HP Kayak with a SCSI Drive. I get a boot error when trying to boot from the CDROM or Install Disk. This system is currently running NT 5. Any ideas why the boot would fail?

I've had some serious problems with an dual PII-266 HP Kayak XU that I recently acquired... I'd get read errors on the IDE CDROM while trying to install Mandrake 8.2, after many failed install attempts, I finally got it to the part where it was actually installing RPM's, and it would go very slowly, with frequent read errors that caused about a third of the packages to fail to install. The system would boot, but wasn't much good beyond that. Putting a SCSI CDROM drive in helped some, though the install was still dog slow due to read errors, and bombed twice. Maybe it needs ECC memory or some BIOS tweaking, or maybe it's a SCSI driver issue? I really have no idea, I just know mine has been a pain in the ass too! Nate -- Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you. -- Aldous Huxley