Linux installation help needed

mqd500

I am a college student and I am getting ready to take a Linux class. The book I bought for the class came with Red Hat Linux disks. I have a Toshiba lap top with windows 7 and would like to make it dual boot. I created a 50g partition on my hard drive and set it to boot for the CD rom. Restart the computer and it comes up asking how I want to install (GUI or text based). I hit enter to do GUI the screen goes black and it appears like it is installing. It gets to "running /sbin/loader" and goes no father. I do not know what I need to do that I am not doing. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank You

Goineasy9

What version of RedHat are you trying to install? What kind of video card is in the laptop (how old is the laptop?)? Older versions of Redhat may or may not be able to handle the newer video cards.
Now, does the screen go black, or, do you see the boot scroll appearing on the screen? Where do you see the running /sbin/loader message?
Maybe you can give us step by step what you've done during the install. Black screens during installation usually point to a graphics driver not working with a video card, but, that's a guess until we can get some more information from you.

mqd500

The disks that I have just say Red Hat Linux Fedora Core 2 Software. The lap top is about a year old. The display is an AMD M880G with ATI mobility Radeon HD 4200. That is according to Belarc Advisor. I apologize for the confusion about the black screen. It is the boot scroll. That is where I see the "running /sbin/loader".

Goineasy9

Fedora Core 2 is years out of date. I'm using Fedora 14, and, since it has a release every 6 months, I would say it's about 6 years out of date. While modern distros can work on old hardware, old distros have problems running on newer hardware, especially video cards. Is it possible for you to download a newer version of Fedora? Installing from the DVD has the most options, although installing from the LiveCD should work for you also.
It is possible that the media your using may just be defective also, after all, it has to be years since it was released.

If your interested in a new version look at this link here:
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options#formats

If you really need to install Fedora Core 2, because of class requirement, we would need more information. Maybe a list of what steps you took, what answers you gave, etc. I don't believe the installer for FC 2 was very advanced.

mqd500

Thank you for your help I will check into the link you gave me. I am not sure why the would give me such an old copy of it. Thank you again for your time.

woboyle

Download and install VirtualBox from Oracle (free for non-commercial use), and install Red Hat in a virtual machine. You can then run it at the same time you are running Win7. All you need is memory (1-2GB is plenty - I use 2, but 1 will do if you are constrained for RAM).