I'm trying to isntall RH 6.1 on a dual-pentium pro system (Super P6DNF). This system has an IDE 4G harddisk on the IDE1 master and an ATAPI CDROM on IDE1 slave. IDE2 is empty. It also has a floppy and a DAC960 RAID system installed. I tried to install RH 6.0 on this system and it installed, but I got all kinds of strange errors; running rpm -V after installation revealed a large number of MD5 checksum errors, including such diverse (and important) packages as cpp and libc.so! I could only get it to install and boot at all (even with checksum errors) if I didn't install the DAC960 modules. Also, it seemed to choose to boot an SMP version of the kernel and that seemed _very_ flakey; if I changed LILO to boot the non-SMP version it worked much better after install, but the install was still screwed up. I decided to try RH 6.1 instead, since it uses a later kernel, etc., but now I can't get it to boot at _all_. I boot off the CDROM and it comes up with the "hello" screen. If I choose the standard install it detects the DAC960 and then at the bottom of that same screen it immediately dies with this: BUG IN DYNAMIC LINKER ld.so: ../sysdeps/i386/dl-machine.h: 391: elf_machine_lazy_rel: assertion `((reloc->r_info) & 0xff) == 7' failed Then it unmounts some things and says I may reboot safely. So, I tried to boot in expert mode. Here I choose "Cancel" when asked about device driver disks and say "Done" immediately when asked about other drivers, so it doesn't try to detect the DAC960. It asks me language info, then detects my CDROM, then immediately dies at the bottom of that screen with this error: python: error in loading shared libraries: /lib/libc.so.6: undefined symbol: xdr5_u_short, version GLIBC_2.0 If I use ALT-F2 to switch to a shell prompt just before the screen asking about a CDROM, then I can use shell builtin commands but I can't run any non-shell command like df, ls, etc. because they all die with the first error above, the "BUG IN DYNAMIC LINKER" error. I'm pretty much stuck here, I can't see any way forward. Any ideas? BTW, someone else installed this RH6.1 disk on a different system so the disk seems OK; no one else ever tried this RH6.0 disk.
Where did the installation media that you are using come from?? I have not seen any of these problems and am not able to replicate that in the lab, so I am tending to think that you have corrupt media.
Both my RH 6.0 and 6.1 media is official RedHat CDs, directly from RedHat. I now suspect either a kernel or hardware error. I loaded an old copy of Debian 2.0 on this system, which ships with kernel 2.0.34, and it installed flawlessly. I then proceeded to upgrade it first to Debian 2.1, then to Debian 2.2 (potato frozen). It all worked great. Then I downloaded Linux 2.2.14, compiled it, and booted, and many invocations of bash died a horrible death with weird heap errors, internal consistency check errors, etc. Note that bash is the default shell, so the system can't boot because many of the init scripts won't run! I reboot back into my 2.0.34 kernel, with everything else exactly the same, and it works fine. Boot back into 2.2.14, it dies again. I downloaded 2.3.99 last week, same problem (although actually it seemed a little better; not so many scripts failed, but the system still can't boot correctly). I tried recompiled with GCC 2.7.2 instead of 2.95.2, but still got the same problem. I'm suspecting a kernel problem on my hardware, since kernel 2.0.x seems to work, and FreeBSD has been loaded on this system in the past and that worked, too.