OK, I’m following the directions for Memtest86. I seem to be having floppy problems–memtest fails when trying to write to the boot disk. The instructions say that I can put the boot image in a directory and point to it from LILO. Unfortunately, I’m not running LILO, and it has no instructions for doing this from grub. I’m reading the grub manual, but it’s not clear what commands I need to run to tell it to boot from the image. I tried > kernel /root/memtest/memtest.bin, and I get the message “Error 12: Invalid device requested.

Any suggestions?

[Update about 2 PM EDT]

Thanks for all the help. I found the rpm of memtest86 (they made one for FC-3–who knew?) and installed it (by the way, my problems with downloading files via Firefox seemed to disappear when I logged into X as root). I ran it and it found memory errors immediately. I pulled the stick, and remounted it, and it still has problems. I guess I need new memory before I do anything else with the machine.

[Evening update]

Bought a new stick of DDR 2700, Initial testing shows no problems, so it was definitely bad memory. My next question, per Pete Zaitcev’s advice:

What I would do in your place would be to upgrade with yum. It’s as simple as one-two:

one: point /etc/yum.conf to FC4, update distro

two: FC4 moves to /etc/yum.repos.d, edit its contents to point to FC5, update distro.

How does one “point to” a distro? Here’s my yum.conf now:
###########################
[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=newest
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
exactarch=1
retries=20
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1

# PUT YOUR REPOS HERE OR IN separate files named file.repo
# in /etc/yum.repos.d
###########################

So what am I supposed to do to upgrade from FC 3 to FC 4 and then to FC 5?