trying to get linux up and running on a frankenstein box. i am newb from head to toe (as far as installing linux goes). what i know of my frankenstein hodge-podge box:

amd k6 processor
24 megs ram
1 - 500 mb hd (fat)
1 - 2 gb hd (fat32)
1 - ide cd-rom (atapi i think)
1 - good old floppy drive

i got the 3 disc images redhat 9.0 downloaded (i am using my other computer to do this stuff: g4 mac with osx, but i am installing on the aforementioned intel machine). i ran the md5checksum and made sure the download was good. i burned the images (succesfully, osx tells me) onto three cdrs. i set my bios to boot from cd-rom. when i put the 1st disc in and power up my system, bios processes, and then it says "booting from cd-rom". it waits a bit and i get this:

ISOLINUX 2.0 2002-10-25 isolinux: Disk error 01, AX = 429B,9F

and that's where it sits until i kill it.


any advice?

thanks in advance.

try making a boot floppy.

run the rawrite program in the dosutils folder to create a bootable floppy using the images\bootdisk.img file (I think its called). you run rawrite from the command line. there is instructions on the CD I think.

Please before you do anymore with ur Linux Red Hat 9 install I want you to know you probably dont have the hardware requirments. YOur biggest hard drive wont even support the room for a typic package install. Just about every component in your system will kill its own self b/c it just wont handle the OS.

It is very possible to do a RedHat 9 install under 1GB, in which case the 2GB drive should do nicely for a root partition & the 500mb HDD for a swap file.

Unless he allready has an OS installed on it, that he wishes to keep.

As well as using a boot disk, it may be necessary to pass a boot option to the kernel, I think some research would be required to find out what this is. But try the boot disk first on its own.

I don't think RH9.0 works with 24 MB of RAM.

I'd personally condemn that system as being too slow to run X11 anyway, but - check the CD's are good. I've had no end of RedHat CD problems, with 6, 8 and 9 anyway. My 7 CD's worked first time for some weird reason, the others all needed reburning

You'll get Linux and X11 on that system, it just will not run too great....

...Well, what I should say is it will run "after you make your RAM upgrade." Get yourself up to 64MB at least.

X should run tolerably as long as he won't try to run KDE or Gnome. Something light like WindowMaker, IceWm or *box should be quite OK to use.