I would love to leave Darth Gates and his world behind, and once every year or so I try Linux. I've read how user friendly and seemless Redhat 7.2 is.... very nice interface.. But it won't work. I installed 1.9 megs of programs.. very nice loading interface.. chose my swap file, and program file.. as the included option to do that automatically wouldn't work. I kept one 6 gig drive seperate from XP to put linux on.. the default auto load program from linux couldn't handle that.. doesn't seem like rocket science to me. I installed Grub to the MBR, I made a boot linux disk........ grub will not initialize.. the boot disk says it won't work either. Can anyone tell me what I might be doing wrong, or should I wait till next year. Is it that hard to expect a Linux version which can install on it's own drive, and coexist with Darth's software.. till one gets used to it?

are you using an amd or pentium system? redhat seems to have known issues with the athlon processor. also you may want to try and install grub (i only use lilo so not too sure about this one) on the first partition of your linux system as with lilo become bothersome if it's put on the mbr.

I only use athlon for my XP and redHat 7.2. However I use custom partitions for RedHat /swap "same as your RAM" /boot "around 55 meg" / "around 5 to 6 gb"

I hate to see another hopeful fall to the "dark side." The grub boot loader is supposed to handle more hardware problems then lilo. I have also always installed lilo (or grub) to the Master Boot Record. Now, let me get this straight... you have two hard drives or one? As far as having the install interface automatically partition your drive(s), don't do that... it may not have liked that because you have a fat32 (or NTFS) partition already defined and it may not want to erase that partition. So... do as you did before, and define each partition individually. Since you are somewhat new at this, use this convention: swap -> 2x your RAM (or same as RAM from 256MB on up) / -> The rest of your available space. Go on with the procedure from there... But I need to know whether you have one disk or two. That may be the problem..... Let me know...

if you plan on making Linux and Windoze cohabit together, i'd suggest trying loadlin lilo does throw a howler with some setups. You avoid having to mess with the ghastly HDD innards, and you can load straight into linux from windows desktop with a double-click if you use winux, no exiting to DOS-only or floppy boots. the way to do it from your setup at the mo, would depend on if you can get into your RH 7.2 or not. I dont think you're falling short of space .. 6Gig is plenty fine. Besides it would have specifically told you if there wasnt enough room. From your post i gather the install went fine but the booting into linux is where it fails .. Its a three step job: mount windows in linux, copy boot image to a dir there, put loadlin and winux (frontend for loadlin) in that dir. Then all you do is double click on winux and you should be able to come away from the Dark Side. If you can get at the cli ( ie install went ok) use it to mount your windows hdd (Type mount -t vfat /dev/hdxx /mnt/xxxx as root to manually mount it. xxxx is an (empty) directory . Then copy vmlinuz image from /boot ( the one with the version number is the one you want , the other is a link to the first) to a windows dir. Next get winux (it has loadlin in it) from http://www.linux-france.org/prj/winux/English/ . Install point to image and double-click. If your install wasnt clean (you cant login) reinstall RH. I timed my RH7.2 install from insert-bootfloppy-in-fdd-and-press-power-up to getting kde desktop at 36 min. Dont forget to choose no boot loader ( other two options are lilo or grub). Then you do the above bit. HTH, good luck post followup on how you got on ..

I've instaled RH 7.2 on a separate 2.1G HDD, and I can't boot into Linux. The Install went fine. I have a winXP on c: ona a 40G HDD with NTFS. I tried using either LILO og GRUB, but both had the same problem. The Dark Side loads perfectly fine.