Mandrake 9 Install Problem

[jamesmi]

I spent several hours trying to get mandrake 9 installed onto my computer over the last two days. My system specs are:

Intel Celeron 366 Processor
Abit BE6 Motherboard
128 Megs of Ram
Maxtor 13.6gig Hard Drive
ATI All in Wonder 8mb Video Card

I tried 4 different cd-rom drives and 3 separate cd's and I get getting errors when the files started copying files. I tried 2 different Lite-On 52x readers a BTC 2x cdrw drive and my Lite-On 48x12x48 cdrw drive. It says something along the lines of "there was an error copying..."

It doesn't matter which cd I use and it doesn't give the error on the same package everytime. I even tried doing a ftp install over my local network and it ends up just freezing up.

I finally was able to get it to install after pulling my dvd drive made by Lite-On from my main computer. After I tried this 5th cdrom drive it work fined.

I also did check the md5sum and it was identicle to what it shows on mandrakes website.

Any ideas on what was causing this problem.

Thanks
James

[sk79]

I am having the exact same problem - but still haven't managed to rectify it.

During the installation, I get a message saying <thepackage>.i586.rpm can't be found & asks if I would like to continue. When I press yes, every other package fails in the same way.

I've tried:

- installing from my hard drive (all partitions)
- disabling UDMA on my hard drives
- checking the iso using md5sum (they match)
- the minimum installation
- varying the packages
- unplugging my second hard drive

...all with no joy. On the off chance that I had downloaded 4 dodgy iso files, I even bought PCW magazine (which had Mandrake on the coverdisc) and tried to install it.

Any other ideas (I'm close to giving up!)

[ShieldWolf]

jamesmi, it sounds like flakey hardware to me. When you switced to the dvd drive did you also change cables by chance? I've learned that ide cables can be pretty fragile and try to keep a spare on hand. You might also have a faulty motherboard, and just got lucky on that last try. Did you burn all the cd's yourself.? Perhaps you got hold of some bad media, and the dvd drive just did a better job of reading it than the cd drives.

sk79, have you had any luck with any other distribution, or is this your first install on this machine? You might also want to try a new ide cable. Or try one of the run from cd distributions like Knoppix, Gentoo Live or Demo Linux to make sure Linux will run on your hardware.

I currently have Mandrake 9.0 installed on 4 totally different machines, and haven't run into this problem, although I did have to make new copies of my iso's due to faulty media. The metal film literally blistered and peeled off the plastic cd.:mad:

[sk79]

yep, a friend gave me knoppix a while ago - that's what gave me the taste for Linux.

As far as the cd media goes, I've tried it on a couple of different brands and tried installing it from the hard drive. The checksums were ok too...

this is really baffling me

[dkeav]

again sounds like the partition your installing to is not set up correctly or you have bad bios settings how are you setting up your partitions or are you making one in the first place

[sk79]

I've disabled all those bad boys - I think the BIOS is ok