gah, this is driving me insane, no linux distro will install on my pc, none of them, each one i have tried, mandrake 8.2, redhat 7.3, suse 8, all 3 of them hang during setup when they detect my drives, i've tried 3 different kernel's as well, even with both of my hdd's unplugged and only my cdrom it still hangs with it attempts to detect ide devices when the kernel is first loading, i've tried three different ide controllers as well, onboard via ide, onboard promise raid, and a promise pci ata133 controller, all yield the same freezes, help? please? lol

I think what you need to do is change a setting in your BIOS so that it doesn't use raid.

Also use the normal ide controller.

I think you should be able to boot then.

nope, that didn't work :(

I've just finished trying Caldera, which had the easiest install to date and mounted my #2 hd, whereas I had trouble with SuSE 8.0, RedHat 7.3 and Mandrake 8.2.

My biggest problem in getting started was I didn't know how to format my drive, making the ext2 and swap partitions first, then doing the installs. Trying to do the fully automatic installs without first making the partitions was not good for me.

I also had RedHat refuse to boot after install because it had trouble finding a driver for my USB HP6200C scanner.

I have a Dell with A10 bios. Didn't do anything other than set it to CD boot first.