[CLUE-Tech] red hat install freezes

[Keith Hellman]

On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 05:43:44PM +0000, Jason S. Friedman wrote:
> Strange problem here.
> 
> I have a 400Mhz PII with 6.5G drive and 256MB of RAM.  It has Win98 on it.  I 
> used FIPS to split the drive in half -- worked beautifully, Windows still 
> "works".
> 
> I tried installing Red Hat 7.3 from CD.  This is the same set of 3 CDs I used 
> to successfully do a full install on another box.
> 
> I partitioned the remaining space on the hard drive into 256MB swap, 48MB 
> /boot, and the remainder (~3GB) into /.  I answered all the questions 
> (selecting the workstation option), and the installation begins, but it 
> hangs.  Sometimes it hangs at the "installing image phase".  Sometimes it 
> hangs in the middle of installing a package.  One time I made it all the way 
> to the insertion of the second disk, but it hung shortly thereafter.  I have 
> tried checking the drives for bad sectors, and tried without the check.  
> After 10 tries and failures, I'm about to give up, but thought I might 
> solicit some feedback first.

Simply because you've installed another machine with a set of CDs does
not necessarily mean the CDs are 100% perfect.  It just means you didn't
hit the bad bit when installing.  I would:

On a known good machine, I would mount each cd, then run
	find /path/to/cd -type f |xargs cat >/dev/null
You may find that one of your CDs errors in this phase.  I ran into this
situation just a couple months ago when installing a RH 7.3 box.

If all the CDs pass, then I would be suspicious of the CD ROM in the
new target machine.  If your comfortable with it, do the following:

Boot RH install, bail to rescue system, do the same test as above with
each CD-ROM (IIRC, RH rescue runs from RAM only, CD doesn't need to be
mounted).

If all else fails, you can set the CDs up on another boxen (notebook
maybe?) and do an ftp install to the troublesome machine.

Keith