HD Install :: id 1 spawn too fast

My attempt to rig a simple system for my mom using Linux has failed miserably. I should have stuck with the first machine...her original one. It worked the best, but was giving beep codes like it didn't like the ram. So I ripped out the guts and put it all on a newer emachine board. No linux distro could boot in that one...either install or live cd. I thought the mother board was bad so cdrom wasn't reading well...nope.

Another low end system...same deal. the frustrating part is that I got NO error messages...no idea what the problem is.

Well, anyway, I decided to try dsl and it's come the closest so far. This is a P3 with a Radeon 7200 vid card. The boot from cd worked flawlessly...if I could just reproduce that with the install, because the installed version got nowhere.

One line after loading the kernel I got:

ID 1 Respawning too fast...disabled for 5 minutes.

I googled that but the explanations were unclear and the fixes involved trying to get access to inittab and things of that nature. Since I can't boot, I'm sure you see my problem.

I don't need fancy graphics. I just want a useable system. Any ideas why I can do everything I want by booting from cd but not from hard disk? Seems if the cd can do it than simply installing should be able to.

I had this problem on a new secondhand Compaq, turned out the hard drive was on the blink, replaced the hd and all is good

I would try formatting the drive again.

original here.