I'm preparing to teach my Unix system administration class next week, which is taught by installing RedHat on the class PCs. I'm trying to boot the RH5.2 boot.img disc. The disc works fine on two Pentium systems, but doesn't work on two 486 systems (one 486/33 w/16MB, one 486/66 w/32MB). In both cases it hangs at four dots into the initial ramdisk load prior to loading vmlinuz. Any ideas why the ramdisk loading would hang?
I was not able to replicate this problem on the following machines: Generic 486 DX/2, 16 MB ram, 1.2 GB harddrive, using boot.img from 5.2 CD Packard Bell 486 DX/2, 16 MB ram, 340 MB HD, using boot.img from 5.2 CD. Both machines successfully loaded the initrd.img from the boot disk. I would suggest seeing what hardware components may be similar on both machines and give us more information if possible.