I'm currently trying to install RH 8.

First I burnt the three neccasary ISOs to disks with the first one burnt as a bootable disk. I used boot.img for the boot image. Then set my bios to boot from the cd-rom. It boots, and goes to a RH 8 install screen where I can select graphical or text installation. I select graphical. It starts loading (vmlinuz)(initrd.img) but it hangs for over 5 minutes at...

Partition check:
hda:

Then it lists an IRQ and hangs indefinitely. I thought it was a problem with booting to cd-rom. So I made a boot floppy using rawrite and booted to that. Same thing happened. Then I found that it happens no matter what option I select. And it happens if I type "linux mediacheck" or "linux askmethod" as well.

I've made multiple boot disks and multiple cd-roms. So it's not bad media.

The problem isn't hardware either. I'm fully compatible and the system current does boot to Win98 (I'm on it now). I have two hard drives, both partitioned in half.

What's going on here. I've done all the troubleshooting I know how. But with no luck. Any help is greatly appreciated.

First, plug your HD cable to the correct drives, i.e. last end = hd1 and 2nd end = hd2.
2nd, set the jumpers on the back of HD's to master & slave
3rd, go to BIOS, disable SMART, HD swapping, APCI/ACPI(?), PnP OS Aware
4th, boot RH8 CD1 and check the media, it takes a while.

I set the cables correctly. Although, in all my experiences the order in which drives are plugged into the IDE cables has never mattered. I set the PnP OS off. My bios doesn't have any of the other options.

But the same thing still happens. It's the same with attempting to install with both graphical and text install, as well as checking the media.

It hangs on...

Partition check:
hda:

Then, after about 5 mins. it adds...

spurious 8259A interrupt: IRQ7.

Then it hangs and/or locks forever.


I'm going to try RH 9. I'll have to spend a while downloading again but hopefully it'll be worth it. (i.e. - it'll actually work)

Thanks for the help anyway.

I'm not sure how new your system is, but some of the newer one's set all devices to the same IRQ. If yours doesn't have this option, you might check to see what device is set to IRQ 7, then try from there. If it ends up being a card, try change it's slot in the case... that's about all I can think of to do.

Eric