Neverending Restart when booting into linux

I've decided to hookup my brother's old rig, its an Intel Celeron 166mhz, or maybe just an Intel Pentium I or something, but its 166mhz. Anyways, the computer will boot and go through the Hewlett Packard screen and then it has the LILO os chooser which ijust let it go to Linux and it runs through and says 'Loading linux........... and then it does uncompressed linux.....' really quickly and then the computer restarts and it goes through all of this again, over and over again. Any ideas? Btw, i dont have anything plugged, no keyboard or mouse or anything, just the monitor. Could that be the reason?

Originally posted by PHATMAN5050
I've decided to hookup my brother's old rig, its an Intel Celeron 166mhz, or maybe just an Intel Pentium I or something, but its 166mhz. Anyways, the computer will boot and go through the Hewlett Packard screen and then it has the LILO os chooser which ijust let it go to Linux and it runs through and says 'Loading linux........... and then it does uncompressed linux.....' really quickly and then the computer restarts and it goes through all of this again, over and over again. Any ideas? Btw, i dont have anything plugged, no keyboard or mouse or anything, just the monitor. Could that be the reason?

Try plugging the keyboard and mouse..Linux may be rebooting to "hopefully" see the devices on the reboot.

No, that would be too logical and easy i suppose. Unfortunately that didn't work, although i hoped it would have...

Does the machine start in single-user mode? You can get there by entering linux 1 at LILO prompt. Check /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog for possible reasons (with less command, for example). If single-user mode doesn't work, you could try booting from a floppy or put the harddisk to another machine which can read ext2 partitions.

Originally posted by Mictlantecuhtli
Does the machine start in single-user mode? You can get there by entering linux 1 at LILO prompt. Check /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog for possible reasons (with less command, for example). If single-user mode doesn't work, you could try booting from a floppy or put the harddisk to another machine which can read ext2 partitions.

Or boot from the installation CD and type "linux rescue" at the boot: prompt.... Your system is then mounted under /mnt/sysimage, the rest of the file system is inside a RAM drive....

Do you think that an Intel Celeron 166mhz with 64mb is too slow to run Linux Redhat 7.2? I have another computer, its a PIII 550mhz without a PSU and whenever i try and use another psu in there it doesn't turn on, so it may or may not work...Hopefully that intel celeron can run it :)

I've never heard of Celeron 166. I think it's just Pentium 166 (possibly with MMX) or a typo, Celeron-266. Anyway, it's not too slow to run RH7.2, at least not in text mode :)

yeah ur right, i think its a Pentium 166 not a celeron but im positive its a 166. You think it would cause it to restart if i dont run it in text mode?

Nope, you should still be able to run X Windows, albeit slowly and not very nicely.

Note Mictlantecuhtli 's post:

Originally posted by Mictlantecuhtli
Does the machine start in single-user mode? You can get there by entering linux 1 at LILO prompt. Check /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog for possible reasons (with less command, for example). If single-user mode doesn't work, you could try booting from a floppy or put the harddisk to another machine which can read ext2 partitions.

Post the contents of these files if possible.

Boot from the Linux CD, at first boot: prompt enter

linux rescue

once booted, your systems should be mounted under /mnt/sysimage

mount another partiton or floppy disk and copy these files onto it.

Post the files here (if they appear to contain anything suspicious towards the end....)