Help me.......please?

[Oblivia]

Hi -
I recently inherited a decommissioned PC from work and thought I'd give this Linux thing a try -- I've heard a lot of great things about it! Anyway, I downloaded the Ubuntu ISO onto a CD and it boots the thing up OK to the opening screen, but when I select the Install option, it sits for a looooong time and then goes to a black screen with the message:

hda: timeout waiting for DMA

The very old Windows screen comes up if I don't boot from the CD, so I think it's OK, but I'm not such a techie (yet, anyway) that I can do a lot of serious troubleshooting. If anyone can help me out here, I'd sleep much better at night

[arochester]

Do you know how much RAM you have? It should tell you when the computer starts up. To run Ubuntu you will need a MINIMUM of 256Mb.

[Oblivia]

Do you know how much RAM you have? It should tell you when the computer starts up. To run Ubuntu you will need a MINIMUM of 256Mb.

Hi -
It's a Pentium 3 with, as far as I can tell, 384 Mb of RAM.

[Oblivia]

and, as it turns out, 128Mb of that had gone bad somehow. It took a lot of Googling for documentation and poring over it to figure it out, though. But, it's installing away as I type this, so hopefully everything will work out OK. Thanks for the tip!

[yourname3232]

If removeing the bad ram doesn't help, you might want to type "linux ide=nodma" at the boot screen from the install disk.

Also, welcome to the forums and good luck!