Installin Red Hat 8.0

[pstj]

Okay, so I decided I wanted to install Linux on my computer, just to experiment a bit with a new OS - I'm fed up with Windows, and school is finished, so that means I've got plenty of time to learn something new.

A while ago I bought Red Hat Linux 8.0 Bible a while ago. Very complete book, I'm quite happy with it (and I got Red Hat on CDs with it). So I reformatted my hdd to free up some space, reinstalled Windows on a new partition, and then went into the BIOS to change the boot sequence from - A, SCSI, C - to - CDRom, C, A - because I wanted to boot from the CD (which is supposed to be bootable). It didn't work; for some reason it booted straight from the C drive. So my first question is... why am I no able to boot from the CDRom drive? I've got two drives, tried to boot from the two, and each time, it failed.

I then try to make a bootdisk for Linux, using the images found on the CD. Problem is, the boot disk image is 1,440 KB, and Windows keeps telling me that my (formatted) disk is too small. Am I supposed to format the disk using some Linux formatting tool?

Anyways, thansk for the help!

pstj

[TechSupport420]

you can use a CD to create the boot disk for Linux with the same file instead of the floppy

[pstj]

Thanks for the reply! However, I believe that for me to do that, I would have to be able to boot from my CDrom drive, which I can't do, as I explain in the first part of my post. Thanks though, I would have done that if I could boot from my CD....

[mairving]

Making bootdisks is a somewhat painful process, so I would try to avoid it. You have to use a program called Rawrite to make your boot disks which format to 1.68M, then usually make a root disk. It takes about 5-8 disks and there are a 2-3 versions of Rawrite for the different flavors of Windows.

I guess the first thing to do is to stick a bootable CD like Windows in and see if it will boot off of it. If it will, then you probably have a bad disk. If it doesn't, then you have other problems, maybe needing a BIOS update. If you have a fast connection, I would recommend that you get the latest RH, version 9.1. You would have to download an ISO image, and burn a bootable CD. You can get ISO images here for most distros.

[mairving]

Here is how to make a boot disk from RedHat's site.

[TechSupport420]

Sorry I didn't catch that part of your post. It would be best to have a bootable drive and CD if possible but there are ways around it I wanted to research that anyway I will try to post some links for ya

[pstj]

Thank you both for your help, I've managed to do a boot disk using rawrite. Went pretty smoothly.

Now I've installed Linux, but I've got two other problems:
1- when I partition with Disk Druid, and that I create the boot partition, I receive a message telling me something along the lines of "this boot partition may cause problem with your system architecture - a boot disk is recommended" or something like that (I know, I should've written doen what it told me).
2- I managed to install Linux, but now I don't get the boot loader. However, I'm quite certain I've configured everything properly, but when I reboot, the computer boots automatically into Windows. Something tells me this is related to Problem #1.

Anyways, thanks!

pstj

[mairving]

Always create a boot disk. That way you can get Linux to load if your MBR was overwritten.

Can't tell exactly what the problem is by your message.