Mandrake 10 Official (FATAL ERROR IN STAGE1: I/O error)

[ddd3]

I now have two sets of the 'Official' CDs, and they both suffer from the same problem. They don't load. Sometimes they're just plain not even noticed and 9.2 loads up as usual, sometimes the CD is recognized but after a few seconds the machine auto-reboots, and sometimes it's recognized and starts to load, but suffers one problem or another somewhere along the loading path.

After maybe a month of experimenting, I have established that by far the most common error message comes after the 'Loading program into memory' at the beginning of the intall. Sometimes there's a 'thinking period' before it and sometimes not, but the message is:-

error in exec of stage2 :-c
trying to execute '/usr/bin/runinstall2' from the installation volume,
the following fatal error occured

FATAL ERROR IN STAGE1: I/O error

I can't recover from this.
You may reboot your system.

That must be the most unhelpful error message ever, but has anyone else had this problem? If anyone else can identify what may be causing this I just might be on my way to sorting out whatever is causing the machine to malfunction at the sight of the Man10 CDs...

[mdwatts]

I've manually modified the subject as just telling us the distro/version does not give us a clue as to the problem you are having. Thanks

What are your hardware specifications?

Have you verified these cd's using md5sum or media-check? No problem at all installing Mandrake 9.2.

Any bios options you can enable/disable/modify that might help?

[ddd3]

It's a homebuild system (Already I can hear you groaning...)

AOpen AK73-1394(A) Motherboard
AMD Athlon 1.33 w/ Coolermaster fan
768Mb PC133 SDRAM (2 x 256 Crucial, 1 x 256 Easy-PC)
Soundblaster Live soundcard
3Dfx Voodoo 4 4500 PCI graphics
Maxtor 120 Gb HD
IBM 123.5 Gb HD
Generic 48X CD drive
Ricoh DVD/CD-r/w drive
Alcatel Speedtouch ADSL USB modem

There was a problem on the first power up which my sister later diagnosed as W98's inability to handle that much memory, or that size of drive. Unfortunately, by this time I'd been getting advice from everyone, including AOpen, and they all said I needed to upgrade the BIOS. Against my own better judgement, I did, and it seemed to work, except when it was all finished I got a message to say the update was complete, and the computer would now reboot.

It didn't.

I left it for several hours, just in case, but it remained reboot-free, so I rebooted manually. I have no idea if that screwed it in any way, but naturally it made my problems worse. An upgrade to W98se, followed by another to WinME later I was still plagued by endless blue screens of death, and the next upgrade would have been to MS spyware, so I took a deep breath, bought a couple of Linux magazines, and bought Mandrake. (8.2 was the current issue, but I bought the 8.1 gaming edition, and they threw in the 8.2 download discs).

Installing was a breeze, except for the Alcatel Microcode (If you can't get online how do you download it? Sorry. That's just a bit of a bug with me...), and upgrading to 8.2 went smoothly enough, but although they were much reduced, I was still getting blown out fairly regularly.

Since then I've upgraded every time a new version comes out. 9.0 was again an official box set, but 9.1 and 9.2 were both download discs purchased from a local Linux emporium. They say that all their discs are checked, but I can't verify that. Is there any way that I can check the disc myself?

The BIOS is set up exactly as recommended in the AOpen manual and the Mandrake 9.0 handbook.

I was going to buy the official Mandrake 10 boxset, but I'm hoping to upgrade again when the AMD64 chips come down a little in price, so I figured I'd go for the download discs again, and save the official boxset for when I do it.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by ddd3
It's a homebuild system (Already I can hear you groaning...)

I got a message to say the update was complete, and the computer would now reboot.

It didn't.


Nothing wrong with your system.

Actually the system should suggest you completely power off and back on if you've flashed the system bios. Mine always has.

Here are the G4L search results for "FATAL ERROR IN STAGE1: I/O error" (http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22FATAL+ERROR+IN+STAGE1%3A+I%2FO+error+%22&btnG=Google+Search) which you will see they are mostly for Mandrake. Must be a known issue.

[ddd3]

Thanks!

Cheeeze... I thought that was such a catch-all error message that doing a search for it would be a complete waste of time, but they're nearly all the same problem as mine.

The best suggestion I've seen seems to be to burn the disc at a slower speed. Worth a try, I guess...

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by ddd3

The best suggestion I've seen seems to be to burn the disc at a slower speed. Worth a try, I guess...

I've seen many a installation issue fixed by reburning the cd at a slower speed.