SuSE gives choices for: 2.2 or 2.4 for 386, 2.2 or 2.4 for Pentium, vanilla 2.4 (no SuSE patches), and 2.2 or 2.4 SMP. The installation kernel behaves fine, it just dies on reboot. I think I have found the problem. The disk drive has more than 1024 cylinders. The BIOS translates that to a smaller number of cylinders with more heads, but Linux bypasses the BIOS, so bad geometry. A key fact that I just discovered is important is that this box used to be dual boot Windows 95 and Linux. EZ-Drive was installed to handle the larger disk (it's a software extended BIOS). Then I got a dedicated Linux box and made the first box dedicated Windows. Now it is to be a dedicated Linux box and I wiped EZ-Drive. That's the key. I found a Web site that explained this in terms that match my experience. Now to keep reading and fix it. Jeffrey Quoting Allen <aef@prismnet.com>:
I don't know about Suse, however, many distro's are COMPILED FOR PENTIUM.
Redhat, last I checked, had base at 386.
Could be your Linux is all compiled for Pentium and that's the real problem.