problems installing RH

[wanderingwhistler]

Hi all. I recently bought the book Red Hat Unleashed and I´ve been trying to install the version of Linux that came with it onto a Pentium 100 that I have here but I´ve been having some problems. If I try to install directly from the CD, it says something about not being able to find initrd.img. When I try to install by making a boot disk and booting from that I get a variety of errors. Sometimes it only gets to "Uncompressing Linux..." and then stops. Sometimes it gets to "Calibrating delay loop..." and then I get a message like "Unable to handle kernel request" or "unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference". Sometimes I get "Kernel panic. Attempting to kill the idle task! In swapper task - not syncing."
And after the error sometimes the computer restarts itself and sometimes no. So... any ideas?

Mark

[pbharris]

i have seen this happen a few times, everytime it was due to bad media (i.e. cdrom scratched, floppy has bad image)

[f'lar]

that makes sense too, because that book's been out for a while, and I think it still uses version 5.2 or 6.0, so the disk, even though it has never left the jacket, could be close to 2 years old or even more.

[ 20 February 2001: Message edited by: f'lar ]