It was thus said that the Great John Boffemmyer IV once stated: As someone said later on, try an older version of RedHat. 5.2 is good, as I've successfully used that on a variety of older machines [1], and you can secure them down to they are less vulnerable, but if you do that, then you'll either have to install the development system with everything else, or have another box with the same version of Linux [2] to install updated programs like Apache and/or Bind. As for your problems, first, I would remove all but the required cards (drop the sound blaster and token ring). Second, make sure the kernel you are booting to do the install has the proper SCSI drivers in it. RedHat is pretty good about this, but if I remember my Slackware (way back in '93 or '94) you had to select the proper boot disk to match your hardware. I know the later RedHat installations default to something other than fdisk, but it is still available if you prefer it (fdisk is an option under RedHat 5 and 6, but for later versions I'm not sure, not having installed RedHat 6.2 or higher). Also, for older machines, I find the following partitioning scheme (if you are going for Linux-only boot with RedHat) to work wonders: Partition 1: 5M mount as /boot Partition 2: twice physical ram, swap upto 128M max Partition 3: rest of disk mount as / /boot contains the actual kernel and since older BIOSes have problems loading past 500M or so, this ensures that the kernel will reside on space that the BIOS can see (which lilo uses to load the kernel). If you use something other than RedHat, then you might want to try something like: Partition 1: 200M mount as / Partition 2: twice physical ram swap upto 128M ram Partition 3: half remaining space mount as /usr Partition 4: half remaining space mount as /home or for a server configuration, replace the last partition with /var (for log files and spool directories). -spc (Hope this helps some ) [1] My colocated machine is a 32MHz 486SX running Linux 2.0.39 (basically a base RedHat 5.2) running Apache and Sendmail and no development system), my firewall is a 66MHz 486DX [3] with Linux 2.0.39 (again, a base RedHat 5.2 install with no development system) and my primary machine is a 120MHz AMD 5x86 (Linux sees it as a 486) running Linux 2.0.36 (custom RedHat 5.2 install, with development system). I also managed to get a bastardized version of RedHat 5.2 installed on a system with only 4M RAM and 120M harddrive (seeing how the RedHat 5.2 installer wanted 16M RAM and something like a 200M harddrive to even *think* of installing), but it isn't for the faint of heart (although if anyone wants the gory details, I'll be more than willing to share 8-) [2] I tend not to keep development systems on full production servers, preferring to do my development on a dedicated development machine. If a server is compromised, it makes it all that much more difficult for the script kiddies to further do damage if they can't compile their root kits on the server. And while you can probably get by with developing under, say, RedHat 6.2 for deployment on a RedHat 7.2 box, you do need to keep in mind the differences and what not, so I find it easier to make sure the servers and development boxes are as close as possible to being the same. [3] Why not use my firewall as my colocated server? Um ... well, I got the colocated server before I aquired my firewall machine, and secondly, the firewall machine is a Compaq, and Compaqs are well ... unique ... and are sometimes quite painful to get Linux to run on them.