Allison (and everyone else reading), I struggled with my first Linux installs in 1994. There were no manuals nor any people to help me. I had to get a system up and running to get into business as an ISP so expediency was more important than optimum configuration. I came up with the following recommendations to get a system up quickly and without hassle: 1. 386 or 486 box with AMI (American Megatrends) BIOS. I've had some luck with Phoenix and other BIOS's over the years but I've found AMI to be the most consistent in terms of getting a box operational. 2. RAM is relatively unimportant BUT if you do not have more than 4 megs you will need to go through a procedure to turn on your swap space BEFORE running the install or it will crash and die. mkswap /dev/hdaX Y where X is swap partition number as shown in fdisk and Y is the size of X in blocks swapon /dev/hdaX 3. Do NOT try doing the Linux running out of an MS-DOS directory on your first install. I've NEVER done this nor do I suspect it's that pleasant plus it makes me feel stupid to run Linux out of DOS. :-/ Get a drive, partition using LINUX FDISK (NOT DOS FDISK) and use it all for Linux. 4. Use IDE hard drives until you know enough about doing installs. Then you can use SCSI more effectively. 5. If your BIOS can deal with the drive, Linux can too...with CERTAIN exceptions...on some BIOSs you're given the choice of using Normal, Large or LBA for block addressing. Sometimes you have to try different settings to get a Linux install to go. Linux may complain if it thinks the drive has more than 1024 cylinders but the complaint can, essentially, be ignored these days. This is experience speaking. 6. Be prepared to turn off caches...internal and external in the BIOS. Sometimes, especially on newer kernels like Slackware 3.0, you can't get the boot floppy to go because it'll crash out and give you stack dump type information. Try turning off first the external cache and then the internal cache if that doesn't work. Not all caches are created equal. 7. Create TWO partitions with fdisk...the sequence looks like this... do a 'p' to print out the partition list do 'd's to delete all existing partitions do 'n' to create new partition then 'p' to make it primary then '1' to make it the first primary partition, set the starting block at 0 or 1 and the ending block a couple hundred blocks from the last block do 'n' to create another new partition then 'p' to make it primary then '2' to make it the secondary primarty partitition, set the starting block to the next block from the last block of the first partition and the last block to the last block available then do a 't' and select '2' for the partition number and '82' for the type...you can do an 'l' to get a list of types...you want to set it to Linux swap...Linux filesystem or whatever is the default. Partition 1 should be left at the default type and partition 2 should be Linux Swap. Do another 'p' to make sure it looks cool. It may complain about the drive if it has more than 1024 cylinders. Ignore it. Do a 'w' to save the changes, power down and power up with the floppy and do your install. 8. If it's formatting the partitions and freaks out complaining that it can't write inodes or superblocks and gives you a long list of these complaints...and you have a drive over 2 gigs in size try creating 3 partitions...the first two of equal size totalling most of the drive and the last being your swap. Or try a different block addressibility type in the BIOS. 9. There are usually different boot disk types...IDE only, IDE/SCSI, SCSI only. Make sure you use the IDE only. It's the easiest. 10. If you want to install off cdrom and the install won't recognize the drive...wait for the boot prompt when you boot up and type install hdX=cdrom where X is a,b,c or d which correspond to what you're used to as Drive C:, D:, E: or F: If it's an IDE-ATAPI type CD-ROM, it should work. Finally, if someone REALLY REALLY wants to load Linux on a system and is willing to follow my instructions, be patient with me, realize that I have a family to support and will send me some trinket in return (S-100 cards, Shugart SA-400 drives, etc all work) AND are willing to call ME long-distance I can probably help you out. Email is probably easier. The main problem with Linux isn't with Linux...it's with the umpteen zillion cheapo motherboards, peripheral cards and hard drives manufactured for intel-oriented PCs. I've loaded Linux at least a 100 times since 1994 but I do it a pretty low-tech way. Alot of times I'll just load Slackware 2.0 if I don't care about X much. Alot of times I'll just load up Caldera because it's easy. The only way I've NEVER done it is on an MS-DOS drive out of a dos directory. I won't even attempt that. Anthony Clifton - Wirehead seen a running linux box nor