It might be that the bios on your motherboard won't support a 1.2GB 
drive.  I've had a problem similar to this once.  I corrected it by trying 
a smaller hard drive that was supported by the bios.  My machine has an AMD 
K5 100mhz processor.  The bios supports drives up to 8.4GB.  It boots from 
a 1GB drive.  I also have a 60GB drive in it.  My machine has no trouble 
using that drive.

If you can find an old 400 or 500 MB drive, try booting from it.

At 09:27 PM 11/18/01 -0700, Alan wrote:
>I have an old 486SX PC that I thought would be good as a basic Linux install
>to allow my kids to surf with.  It's specs are below.
>
>RH 7.2 install just gets a little ways in and gives up because there is no
>math co-processor.  Slackware 8.0 when clear through the entire installation
>and fails on the first actual boot, printing "LI" of the lilo boot message
>and freezing completely.
>
>Will any of the "standard" distributions work on this PC or should I go
>looking for some distro specialized for low powered systems?  Or, perhaps the
>lilo problem has nothing to do with low power?
>
>SPECS:
>"Dell Precision 486/33S", 33 MHz 486SX, 16MB RAM, 1.2GB IDE hard drive
>(master), 24x CD-ROM (slave), sound card, Intel EtherExpress PRO ISA network
>card.  Video on the motherboard (I don't remember brand), 3.5" floppy drive,
>serial mouse on com1, keyboard.
>
>Alan