[TriLUG] Install hell

[Robert A. Henderson]

I've just wasted an entire day trying to install Mandrake 8.2 and
RH 7.2.  I've installed earlier versions of both before just not on
this machine.

Everything starts off fine but dies after the first 100 or so RPMs go
on the disk. Mandrake complains of a memory exhausted error, RH complains
of (usually) a bad magic # on the bootblock or something similar.

Dell XPS R450, 448Mb RAM, trying to install on a Maxtor 20G drive attached
to a Maxtor ATA-100 controller.

Machine boots/runs Win98 just fine. 98 formats and sees 20G drive, copied
over a ton of files. Maxtor utilities check drive out as ok. 

Radeon 7000 AGP, works ok, everything seems to be hunky dory except after
the install writes to the disk for a while. Tried DiskDruid and FDISK
(linux) and they see drive, partition, format, etc.

I'm at a loss.