Help installing RH Linux 6.1 on laptop...

[mikebw at colossus.bilow.com (Mike Bilow)]

What do you mean "the welcome screen?"  Exactly how do you partition the
disk?  Remember that, depending upon the disk controller and BIOS, you may
not be able to boot a partition larger than 2 GB.  If the machine has LBA
support and the boot partition is between 2 GB and 8 GB, as this is, try
using the "linear" option when running Lilo.

My interpretation of "the welcome screen" is that you are able to boot
Linux successfully and then something goes wrong in userland.

Many laptops seems to use drives that report fictitious geometry.  (An LBA
drive should always report 16 heads, 63 sectors, and 16383 cylinders,
which combined works as a sort of magic cookie.)  You can check this with
Linux "fdisk" and the (p)rint partition table command.  If you need to
adjust this, you can use the e(x)pert mode to set the geometry manually
and use this to write a special partition table to the disk; Linux will
then understand this "secret handshake" which it boots and will display a
"PTBL" correction on the partition check.

Have you tried any other distribution?

-- Mike


On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, Kevin M. Gleason wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I am writing this for Nancy who is trying to install Linux 6.1 Red Hat
> on a laptop with no luck.
> 
> Hardware:
> Mag Portable Verity VLT Series
> Intel MMX Technology
> Authentic AMD AMD-K6 3D Processor
> 32M Ram
> 3G Hard Disk (IDE)
> Built-in CDROM and floppy
> Trident 9660 Linear Accelerator for PCI
> 
> We fdisk'd her hard drive and wiped the dos partition then rebooted with
> Linux boot disk and CDROM.
> Computer hangs now at the welcome screen.
> 
> Any thoughts to make this install a reality? Needs Linux ASAP.
> 
> Kevin


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