Installation Problems!!!

[4w50m3]

I have a P4 at 1.7 Ghz, 512Mb of DDR RAM, a new Western Digital 160 HDD (which i set as master) an older IBM 40GB HDD (now set to slave that has Windows XP Pro installed on it) ...
I installed freespire 2.0 completely without any problems, i gave it 160gigs on the new harddrive but when the computer restarted it froze right at the beginning of the splash screen. I tried to reinstall (and all the other options on the cd) but the installation now freezes a few seconds after the splash screen comes up. I tried to boot up into windows, but nothing i did would let me. I ended up having to let windows rewrite the mdr just so it would load, but right before the logon screen is supposed to come up it just restarts ... I ended up having to reinsall windows over the 160gb linux drive, now i cant even see the G: drive (which linux reassigned to the old windows) however, i can see the other two NTFS partitions on that drive (still E: and F: )

What i really want to do is completely get rid of windows and move to linux (I'm sick and tired of all its problems) but it seems that isnt going to be as easy as i thought. I'm a somewhat savy windows user but i'm brand new to linux. I tried to install linux again but it still freezes on the splash screen every time. can anyone help me or give me any suggestions? did i do something wrong?

[rcgreen]

I'm still superstitious about putting big drives into older computers.
I did an installation of Ubuntu a few weeks ago on a five year old
computer that originally had a forty gig drive. I put a 160 gig in
and installed the operating system and it froze with GRUB error 18.
Creating a separate /boot partition at the beginning of
the drive solved the problem. The /boot directory contains the
stage 2 of the boot loader and the kernel. If an older BIOS cannot
access the whole drive, it won't boot.

Alternatively, you could experiment by making the older drive master, and the
new one slave. Since you don't really need Windows, it won't be there to
complicate matters. It is always easier to install one OS than to do
a dual boot. I am assuming the splash screen you are referring to
is the bootloader ie LILO or GRUB.

[Freston]

Welcome to the forums. I think rcgreen has some very good points. Still, there are blanks as well.

If you press esc during boot the splash screen should disappear and reveal the boot messages. Where does it hang?

And, do you have the same trouble when you boot from a LifeCD?