I am installing Red Hat Linux 7 on my PC which is currently running Windoze ME. I have a second hard drive (Western Digital) 40Gb that I want to install Linux on. Windoze is on the primary drive and I will put LILO there. When I start the installer, hit ENTER, the installer begins to load, identifies all my devices correctly, and then freezes at the message:

running sbin/loader
_

The cursor just sits there and blinks and nothing every happens. I have tried a lot of stuff already such as: partioning the new drive with micro$oft fdisk, creating DOS partions, etc. But nothing works.

What could be causing the system to lock up during install? Is there some special format the destination hard drive should be in? I thought Linux allows you to format the harddrive during installation. Should I have the destination drive formatted? Maybe this isn't even the problem. Any help and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

My system configuration is as follows:
Compaq Presario 7000T
Intel Pentium III 800MHz


Primary IDE 0 : Maxtor 40Gb, 7200RPM Hard drive
Primary IDE 1 : West Dig 40Gb, 7200RPM Hard drive
Secondary IDE 0: DVD
Secondary IDE 1: CD R/RW


AGP TNT 2 Graphics card
PCI Modem
USB Keyboard
Soundblaster Live PCI Sound Card


I can provide other details if you need them to figure out the problem.

by any chance does your m/b use ATA66 or ATA 100 or worse a card that provides the interface.If so you are going to have to goto RedHats site and read up on installing on the 66 or 100 UDMA interfaces.

Thanks for the help, but I finally found the solution on my own after a couple more days of frustration. I read somewhere that the 'running sbin/loader' occurs while Linux is testing USB devices. So, I unplugged my USB keyboard and attached an old PS/2 keyboard I had and after that Linux installed just fine.

I read that the latest kernel has better support for USB, so I install that once they work the bugs out of it.

I hope this helps anyone who has a similar problem in the future.

I too had the same problem, installing RH 7 on my Dell Inspiron 3200 laptop. It wouldn't go beyong "running /sbin/loader".

Although I didn't have anything connected in the USB port and it was disabled in my bios I noticed that the PNP option was set to "NO". Once I set this to yes the installation went with no problem.

Thanks for all the ideas.