> > What shows on the other console (ctrl-alt-F2)? > > Never knew you could access another console on install. Yup, you can even use the apps that are already installed. I heard from a friend (but not tried myself) that you can even watch a movie with mplayer during the install :-). But maybe that is a bit too much... > The install kernel did find a swap partition with 360 megs. > 70megs were cached, ~ 300 megs free. > > top showed anaconda cpu at 99.4% and .exe ( ?? ) at 0.5%. I had the exact same behavior on a similar machine (700MHz, 128MB RAM) doing a clean install. On a dozen various attempts, anaconda just hanged at random points --- during "starting install process", or during installation of this or that package (mostly somwhere in the middle of the install). No matter graphical or text installation, no matter the selection of packages. The install media passed the check. The symptoms are always the same --- top shows anaconda is working 99%, hd is idle, everything else is waiting. Memtest ran ok for several hours before... It just may be the too low memory issue, but things got better when I replaced the cd drive with another. Then I was able to do a smooth clean install of minimal set of packages, boot the machine and yum everything else needed. Btw, that "faulty" cd drive was afterwards completely functional and had no problem with it since (it's back in the box). There are two possible explanations that I gave to myself: 1) Anaconda doesn't like to try hard to read the data off the cd. If it fails on the first try, it hangs, pretending to be working 99.something %. 2) Gremlins and power supply issues (I've seen it happen --- cd drive and cpu working simultaneously are too much for the power supply...). However, I stress again that the install *did* work with 128 MB ram, being a clean install, having used the swap partition and on a minimum set of packages. Did after anaconda was satisfied with the performance of the cd drive, that is. :-) Or maybe you should just try again and again and again until it works :-). HTH, :-) Marko Marko Vojinovic Institute of Physics University of Belgrade ====================== e-mail: vmarko@xxxxxxxxxxxx
