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How to install Linux on my machine?? HELP!!

I have a am486dx4 120mhz, 24 megs of ram, a trident svga video card, creative 8x cdrom set a slave, a 1.2 gig connor hd set as master, no modem, no nic, and one floppy. I have tried to load red hat 4.2, slackware, and caldera openlinux lite. Each reboot of the boot image on floppy results in this error:
boot:
Loading install........................
Uncompressing Linux...

crc error

-- System halted_

This is frustrating as I do not know how to fix the problem. I have tried numerous different floppies, that is not it. I even used a different floppy drive, that is not it either. The machine runs perfect with msdos 6.22, including the cdrom.
The only success I have had is starting the install of caldera openlinux from DOS. This works throught the complete installation. When I try and reboot for the first time the machine gives me the NO OPERATING SYSTEM error. I guess that has to do with the partitions and the boot program. I have no idea how to make this work. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Jesse

You can use LOADLIN to boot your floppies, ie. for Slackware:
loadlin <bootdiskname (ie. bare.i)> root=/dev/ram rw initrd=<rootdiskname (ie. color.gz)>

This should work for RedHat too, but I don't know how the files are called, you might want to look that up.

jesse_stewart

ASKER

Can you expand your explanation farther. I am fairly new to linux and this is greek to me.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

yueweng

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jesse_stewart

ASKER

I did that, like yueweng said, but the cdrom forze shut after the installation of reed hat was complete. Any ideas??

jesse_stewart

ASKER

I meant to say that I did that, like yueweng said, but the cdrom froze shut, won't open at all, after the installation of red hat was complete. Any ideas??

If your cdrom drive is mounted, it won't open. To open it, first unmount it (ie. umount /dev/cdrom)