[ LUGOS ] Problems Installing Red Hat Linux 5.0

[Mulei Nthenge]

hello,
I recently bought the RH 5.0 installation cd-roms and boot diskette
intending to install it on my 800MB machine, which already had windows 
95 on it. this is the story of my life:

 i used fips to repartition the disk and wound up
with a 250MB partition for LINUX. i installed a basic version 
there but there wasn't space enuff to install the real nifty features -
not even XFree86 or nothing.

so i went ahead and bought a 4.3GB internal disk...all IDE....everything 
on this machine is IDE except a zip drive i bought
couple days ago.


well, turns out the BIOS was too old to read past 2.5GB so i went ahead 
and replaced it with a new one. i verified that it works cos
it can boot both linux and windows 95 on the 800MB disk. 

now it can also read the 4.3GB disk.....so i went ahead and started
installing RH 5.0.....i partitioned the disk into a 500MB dos partition,
a 100MB root partition, and an extended partition that will contain
the swap partition (16MB) and the rest of stuff like /usr (500MB), 
usr/local(500MB), /usr/src(500MB) 
and /users ( rest of space for the two or more peeps in the house who 
will be using it). 

whenever i run thru the installation procedure,

1) if i include all of the mount points, the machine hangs when 
formatting the /users partition....when i check the installation log
it seems to hang when writing some inodes (not precisely sure what
the inodes in an as yet empty partition would be).

2) if i change the /users partition from Linux Native to Empty and run 
thru installation, i get this message

mount failed: device or resource busy. 

when i look thru the system messages, it says it was unable to mount
/dev/hda2 which is the root.../dev/hda1 is /dos, not included in 
formatting or nothing....just defined so i can access the 500MB dos 
partition from linux.

i have made sure that the root partition starts before the 1023rd 
cylinder (unnecessary since this BIOS should be able to read the whole 
darned thing) but it's not wholly contained within this 1024 limit...it 
straddles it.. i have enabled LBA on my BIOS setup.  


anyone got ideas what the problem is?


thanx a lot.


please email me back at mtoto na hotmail.com
 
mulei
 

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