On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 08:46:02AM -0500, Russ wrote:

I'm installing CentOS 4.4 64-bit Enterprise on a Dell Dimension with and AMD dual core 3800+. When it starts to load eth0 it hangs. I have not found a way to break out of it. Or how to boot at run level 0. So newby Question 1 how do I get it to boot without loading eth0 so I can make changes?

There's no runlevel 0. You want runlevel 1 or 2. You can boot to any runlevel by specifying it as an argument on boot. For instance, when your computer starts and grubs presents the kernel it is about to boot, press any key to abort automatic boot and then press 'a' and add the 1 (or s) and then press enter.

This changes for xen boots or some other distributions without (a)ppend support in grub. For those, press 'e', select the line with the kernel image and add the 1 to it.

If you just don't want to start networking, the boot process tells you to press 'I' for an interactive boot. (I think it's 'I', I don't usually use it.)

Question 2 what is a likely problem and fix.

I suspect your system isn't getting answers for its dhcp requests. If that's the cause, it should timeout after some time, and you can set an fixed IP address to avoid dhcp altogether.

If it hardlocks, then you probably have a hardware problem, possibly related to interrupts ("try booting with the options acpi=off noapic nolapic"). You can see if it hardlocked by pressing ctrl+alt+del, if it's still live it will start the reboot process.

Question 3 what is good documentation and other resource to find answers for sys admin questions.

The Linux Documentation Project (tldp.org) has some good howtos and guides. Somewhat outdated in some cases, but still good reading.

There are also some books on Linux and RedHat administration (CentOS is based on RedHat).

And then there's /usr/share/doc and the man pages, that have a lot of usefull info.