at the end of the install when lilo goes to write to the MBR it errors out and I am also unable to make a boot disk. this is the second machine it has happened on
Need more detailed information about partition setup, hard drive parameters, and possibility of third party boot loaders.
This will happen if have specified a another boot-able OS partition like DOS, but haven't yet installed it. E.g. you create the DOS partition with a DOS floppy disk running DOS FDISK, then you install Linux and indicate during install that you would like to boot off /dos as well. Then, lilo will fail when it can find any boot code for DOS. This is VERY bad for new users. The installer should detect this condition and remove the unboot-able partitions and re-try the lilo installation. Of course, it should indicate this to the user and explain how to "re-run" the lilo installation once DOS/Win9x has been installed. **Please fix this RedHat**
You should just choose retry when the lilo installation fails. Then try again by removing the label for the dos partition and lilo should then skip trying to add the dos partition to the lilo configuration. Otherwise you will need to format and make bootable the dos partition before you install. If you make the dos partition bootable after the install (using fdisk /mbr) lilo will be overwritten rendering Linux unbootable.