installation woes

[Brad Wyble <bradw cs brandeis edu>]

Hello folks.  I'm having a problem with RedHat installation....
 
Here goes.
 
I've got 4.2 tarred on a burned CD.
it's been ftp'ed from the server tsx-11.mit.edu as a tar

I have a hitachi laptop, 120 Mhz, model # is 120CT.
 
I already have a windows 95 partition, not FAT 32

I intend to put REDHAT in the 2nd 500 MB of my 1 gig

No CD rom, but an ethernet PCMIA.
 
I uncompress the CD onto my friend's Hard Drive, copy the files via
ehternet to my WIndows partition
 
make the supplemental disk
 
run autoboot from dosutils


I run through the install uneventfully (already made the swap, root,
var and home partitions, the last 2 being an  extended.  root is hda2,
swap is hda3).
 
When it asks for the pathname to the files, i give it, all's well.
while scanning packages, it tells me    Error: comps file is not version 0 as
expected, but doesn't choke.
 
installation continues, package selection looks cool.
 
then, as it's creating the ext2 file systems on the non swap drives,
(I can't remember how far it gets exactly because it goes through them
quick, but it definitely creates at least the root and goes onto
another).
 
I get the following message, not in a cute little window:
 
Install exited abnormally with signal 11. 
 
unmounting file systems.. blah blah blah
 
system may be rebooted. 


Any ideas?  near as I can figure, the tsx-11 ftp site doesn't keep
their tarred versions of their directories up to date.  Perhaps the
comps file is bogus and if I'd downloaded the whole directory tree
(how is that done anyway?  ftp doesn't seem to do it), I would have a
better version. 
 
Or maybe tsx-11 is just obsolete in general.
 
I really wish that install allowed one to bail into a shell so that
I'm not so damned helpless when it crashes.
 
Slakware had problems too, but I could fix'em because I knew what was
going on..... sort of.  
 

help me please... I'm a desparate soul
 
		-Brad Wyble