install sloooow doooown

Has anyone experienced redhat 7.2 setup which starts the packages
installation fairly zippy, gets about 2/3 the way, then starts crawling
to about 5 MB an hour?   I suspect a disk problem because last night I
attempted a rather elaborate partition scheme to accommodate Oracle's
'optimal framework'.   The install started slow and remained slow :
200MB in four hours!


This is an older Motherboard with pentiumII 500 MB memory,  two hard
drives

This latest attempt, something as follows: 
Primary is 2 GB     50MB /boot    1000   /swap     950  MB /oradata
Slave   is 12 GB    4096MB  /		4096 /usr	   3000MB
/oracle 
achieved 800MB package installation very quickly then started crawling.


I should also stated that I have a difficult time getting redhat to
recognize the larger drive, although the bios detects it everytime.
That's a strange discrepancy.   What I have to do after each failed
install is take the drive to a machine with partition magic and wipe out
the partitions with the 'complete clean' option.

Can anyone confirm that this is a disk problem or help me figure out
what might cause this weird slowdown?

Regards,

John
Lrb-creations
415 647-0457