Install Trouble

[Aciel <aciel speakeasy net>]

System: AMD Athlon TB 1333/266. Asus A7M266 motherboard. 256 MB PC2100.

When RH71 was released, I installed it on my new computer (with the
above specs). There were no problems in the installation. I've been
running it ever since.

When RH72 came out, I immediately downloaded a copy and burned CDs. I
attempted to upgrade the same system to 7.2. Generally, it would show
the text menu that essentially lets you enter options for install
(choose graphical, noprobe, etc). Then I'd start it and it would start
to load initrd.img. Sometimes it would stop partway through that and
just freeze. Other times it would freeze while loading vmlinuz. Other
times still, Anaconda would load and then give me errors galore, telling
me the media was bad after a long pause.

Suffice it to say, the media was not bad. I successfully installed with
the same media on two or three other machines. One was a Pentium III
450, the other a P3 or P4 1000. There were no problems. Nevertheless, I
tried downloading again, and burning that. I tried burning it from other
systems as well. Nothing would work; I hit the same errors with the
machine in question.

So I gave up. Finally valhalla (7.3) was released, and I thought for
sure that they would've solved the problem by then. So I downloaded the
ISOs and checked their integrity (there were no errors anywhere). I also
took out my old Western Digital 20 GB hard drive and replaced it with a
completely empty DiamondMax 80 GB.

The first time, it gave me the Anaconda blue screen, with the caption
"Loading Anaconda." Well, the loading continued for quite a bit too
long, and the hard drive working light went out (as did the CD light),
so I switched to the other terminal, where I saw a plethora of error
messages concerning HDC (my DVD-ROM, a Toshiba SD-M1212). A brief clip
(this is from memory, as I couldn't save the output to a file easily):

Unable to identify CD-ROM format.

hdc: command error: status=0x51
hdc: cdrom_decode_status: status=0x51 {DriveReady SeekComplete Error}
hdc: cdrom_decode_status: error=0x30......

The ..... indicates that I can't remember exactly what came after that,
but it essentially kept restarting the interface and giving the exact
same error messages over and over again. Then it told me the media was
bad and I needed to remove it and hit Enter. Hitting Enter of course did
nothing beneficial.

I rebooted. It listed my IRQ / DMA info, then froze. Hard drive light
and CD light stayed on for a while, then both went out.

I rebooted. Same thing. I tried swapping out the DVD-ROM drive and
replacing it with a 56X CD-ROM from one of the computers installation
had worked perfectly on. It made it much further. Checked the partitions
it was about to create for bad sectors, and such, and then started
copying the install image to the hard drive. At that point it informed
me that there had been an error copying and I was probably out of hard
drive space. Here were my allocations:
/boot - 5MB - bootable - primary
/ - 2000MB - primary
SWAP - 512MB - primary
/var - 10,000MB
/tmp - 1000MB
/usr - 20,000MB
/home - ~47,000MB (fill)
Needless to say, there was plenty of room for the install image.
Nevertheless, it would not install, and asked me to reboot and make
space. I rebooted.

This time it didn't get past my list of IRQ / DMA stuff in the normal
post-bios bootup screen (didn't even get as far as booting from the CD).
Froze completely. I was able to get the hdc error messages again a few
tries later.

I finally had some success when I told my BIOS that the OS was plug and
play. It seemed to like this, and got as far as telling me there wasn't
enough hard drive space for the install image.

What am I doing wrong? I'm about ready to give up. If I stick the 80GB
hard drive in the computer which the RH73 install works on, will it be
able to install to that 80 GB hdd, and when I put the 80 gig back in the
Athlon system will it boot, or will it fail since it was installed on an
Intel machine?

Any advice would be vastly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
John Woods
aciel speakeasy net