newbie 7.3 install hangs at partition check

["Damon Bowman" <damon_bowman yahoo com>]

Trying to install RH 7.3 from downloaded ISO cd images.

 

My computer boots from the CD ok, then I get the install screen that says I can press Enter to launch the install in GUI mode.  When I press enter, a lot of text comes up describing my IDE drives, etc.  I have two IDE hard drives on one channel, and on the other channel I have one CD-R (that the linux CD is booting from) and one CD-RW.  All of these devices appear to be properly recognized as far as I can tell.

 

My problem is that the install gets to the part where it is checking the partitions on hda, and it hangs there with blinking cursor.  At first I thought maybe this process just takes a while, but I have let it sit like this for several hours without any progress beyone this point.

 

I've also tried running "linux noprobe" as well as several of the other options I have seen in the manual and on-line.  All seem to have the same result.

 

My primary hard drive is an 8 GB IBM drive that came with my computer, which is a Dell P2-300 that is several years old.  Both of the hard drives have a single NTFS partition that I want Linux to overwrite.  This will not be a dual-boot machine - it will be Linux only.

 

I'm not sure what to try next - any suggestions are welcome.  Left to my own methods, I guess I would try removing the primary hard drive and making the secondary drive the primary and see what happens.  Both of these drives will partition and format properly under Windows, and they were working fine under Windows 2000.

 

Any ideas?