The root problem may be a bad hard drive, but I'm masochistic.
I believe I have a usable install of Red Hat 7.1 on my girlfriend's cheapie
Acer PC (300 MHz AMD K6, memory upgraded to 128M). For some reason, the
install CD cannot install a boot loader (won't write to the MBR), and when I
attempt to make a rescue boot floppy, the install software doesn't see the
diskette format. The drive spins up, and I get an error message about the
floppy not being formatted. I've tried both MS-DOS and Ext2 floppies. FWIW,
the hard drive is Ext2. Reiser FS from SuSE doesn't take, but the "simpler"
Ext2 raises no error messages.
The upgrade option on the RH install CD sees all the packages, gives me a
nice list, then says there's nothing to upgrade. I think if I can get this
thing to boot, I can get in there to do something about the boot loader.
Since she hardly uses the floppy drive, I could probably live with a
floppy-based boot loader if need be.
>From a an MS-DOS prompt, Loadlin will load the vmlinuz kernel image that came
with the Red Hat, but it can't open a console, dead end. Don't know if a
proper RH rescue boot floppy would do any different.
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