Little Help Please :)

[Webdiggity]

I downloaded all 3 iso images for Redhat 7.3. I installed it on my P166 box with 32 megs of RAM and a 2 gig HD. I keep the packages limited as all I want it for is a web server and to ssh to it in my efforts to use it as my personal education tool. I run a hosting business and need it to mirror what I'm doing with my business box.

To make a long story short, I messed something up really bad and just wanted to start with a fresh install. I had loaned my disks to someone else, so I burned new ones. Now this is what happens.

The box hangs on the installation with the bad media error on disk one. This is the same image I used on the first set which had no problems. I burned another disk 1 with the same results. I tried to install slackware as well and it hung during install as well.

I tried installing both of these on a new partition on my big PC xp1700+ 512 ram etc in a 5 gig partition and it hangs up there as well. However it gets further along.

Do I have a bad distro or is there something I'm doing wrong with my box. I'm considering going to Best Buy and buying a boxed set to eliminate my iso burning.

Thanks in advance,

[Void Main]

Couple of possibilities that I have seen cause this. 1) bad burner, 2) bad CD drive in install machine, 3) bad memory chip in install machine. Of course it could be a number of other things. That's quite a limited amount of RAM you are running there. I imagine things could get quite slow if you run anything of any significance.

[Webdiggity]

Yeah, I'm just wanting a box to host maybe one page and php and perhaps mysql. I'll be the only one using it. I mainly want to just fiddle with it and practice breaking it instead of my business machine which is in Texas by the way. haha

[Linux Frank]

Well a little canned air in the CD drive might help. You could also try burning at a slower speed. I assume you burnt Slack when you burnt the last CD 1 of RH (7.3?). You also might want to try different media. There is always the possibility you have a crap batch of CDs. Are you burning from a Microsoft OS? - if so then make sure when you burn that all screen savers are off, that services are at minimum, and don't use the computer at all when burning. Check the media where possible and use good mirrors, Linuxiso.org are pretty good.

If you can still use your machine enough, and you can connect to the 'net, you could try to use apt-get (see void's tips section) and do a repair on the system. This will try to find broken deps, and the such and reinstall them.

[Webdiggity]

Slack was burned at the same time my originals (which work) were burned. The media has not changed and I've not had problems with it before. I am burning at full speed 16X, I might have burned the originals at 12X. I'll try that again but I'm picking up a set of RH 9 disks from a friend today so I might be able to avoid any more disk wasting. haha I'll blow out the cd rom on the old box tho. Good point.

The thing that puzzles me is that my main box which is nearly new had the same problems. I didn't look at the disk to see if they were crudded up before I stuck it in. Hmmm

Thanks for the help.
Webdiggity