Debian 3.0 installation hangs

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 20:14:22 -0700

Although I lurk here a lot, this is my first post to the list. Hope y'all can help me out here.

I'm installing Debian 3.0 Woody from a bootable CD, all was going great and I wondered why everyone always says Debian is so hard to install. I'm doing a clean install on a clean 40 GB disk. Partitioning and formatting went well, set time zone, added users, set passwords, configured LILO  to load from a 10MB partition at the beginning of the drive. Selected basic X and desktop packages but didn't use Deselect  (or whatever it's called)...THEN...I got to a screen for "Configuring Locales" and I can't get out of it. Doesn't matter if I select the US English locales, or if I leave it all blank, I can't hit "enter" or select "Ok" and move on. I get stuck at that screen no matter what. The only thing I know to do is Ctrl-Alt-Del. 

Then it reboots and puts me through the entire post-partitioning process again. And again I get stuck at that screen. I've tried rebooting without the installation CD and got:
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:05

I rebooted once with "rescbf24" and ended up stuck there again. Each time I reboot I have to select the same packages again, then I get stuck at that %*^&*%$ screen. I hit Alt+ F2 and tried "xf86config", but no go. 

If anybody has a suggestion, could you please word it for a clueless semi-newbie?

TIA,
Siri Amrit