Re: Red Hat Linux 5.0 Installation problem.

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Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 18:25:25 -0600

In article <qzeDd.50529$P%3.1877657@news20.bellglobal.com>, David Lonsdale
wrote:

>I tried installing the Red Hat Linux 5.0 onto the old 486 PC with 48MB RAM
>and 500MB HD.

I realize that not that many modern distributions will operate on something
that old and small, but 5.0 was a real dog. It was the version Red Hat used
to introduce the glibc2 libraries, and there were a LOT of problems with it.
RH5.0 came out seven years ago, and was only supported until April 1999.
RH 5.2 would be a better version if you need such an old distribution (but
it's also been unsupported since October 2001). Something modern like Debian
or Slackware will fit, and are supported.

> After selecting the packages, the installation program
>proceeded to set up the exf2 filesystem. But, in the middle of copying the
>programs from the CD to the hard drive, (where 48MB has been reserved for
>Linux Swap space

That's quite a lot of swap for a distribution that old. Our 5.2 installs
tended to only need 16 Megs with that much RAM - and I don't think we used
swap on systems with 64 Megs of RAM.

> and the rest for the Linux Native space), the installation
>program froze and display an error message in the middle of screen:
>
>Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:05

You are telling the system you want to use partition 5 on the first SCSI
drive (/dev/sda5). If this is correct, are you using the correct kernel
parameters and SCSI controller? Does the partition exist? If I interpret
you correctly, you say you only have two partitions, and partition 5 has
to be a logical one (contained with an extended partition - probably 2, 3,
or 4).

>Does anybody know what this means? Is there a way I can fix it?

Have you looked for suggestions in the installation guide? We only looked
at 5.0 (and 5.1 - we stayed with 4.2 until 1999 when we jumped to 5.2),
and that was _years_ ago - but as I recall there was a decent book that
came with the real Red Hat, and an electronic version of the book was
also included on the first CD. If you are using a GPL version, I can't
say because there were so many different versions, some of which only
included the binarys and IDE install program on a single CD.

        Old guy

• Previous message: Bill Davidsen: "Re: Problems with dvdauthor - please help."
• In reply to: David Lonsdale: "Red Hat Linux 5.0 Installation problem."
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