Guest mjcoates Posted December 1, 2004 Report Share Posted December 1, 2004 I've just joined this group as I am having problems in installing Mdk 10.1 on a new Dell Latitude D505 (Pentium M 735) laptop. The installation proceeds as normal until it starts reading the individual packages that I have selected. A few are loaded and then everything stops. The CD spins down and the machine just sits there with the "busy" cursor. The mouse will track but nothing else works, and you have to switch the machine off. It is not a fault with the CDs as they are commercially pressed, and I also have the same problem with the Mdk 10.0 Powerpack CDs from Mandrake (which I've used successfully to install Linux elsewhere) and the Mdk 9.2 down-load CDs that were burnt successfully. (I've used these successfully as well.) Has anyone any ideas as to what is going on here? I'm trying to locate an alternate, compatible CDROM to see if my DVD/CD is the problem, but that may be clutching at straws since it works fine on my Windows XP partition. (My DVD/CD is a Sony DW-R56A DVD+RW combo 8/4/8 DVD+RW 24/16/24 CD-RW drive.) Is there a hardware compatibility problem of which I'm not aware? I've tried searching for such a list but without success. java script:emoticon('') Yours in frustration, Mike Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted December 1, 2004 Report Share Posted December 1, 2004 At the boot, hit F1 and type "linux noacpii" and press enter. See if that won't get you past the installation. The installer can be a bit of a bear with some hardware. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest mjcoates Posted December 2, 2004 Report Share Posted December 2, 2004 At the boot, hit F1 and type "linux noacpii" and press enter. See if that won't get you past the installation. The installer can be a bit of a bear with some hardware. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> No luck I'm afraid, although things started as more promising. I gave the vgalo acpi options (I presume you meant acpi with one i and not two, although I did try both; I also need to use the vgalo option.) I got a few packages loaded before it gave an error loading a package (libreadline). I responded with yes to continue anyway but the next package gave the same error, and the package after that, and so on. I stopped after a few of these errors. Any suggestions as to the next step? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted December 2, 2004 Report Share Posted December 2, 2004 Yes. Turn off dma, "nodma" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted December 3, 2004 Report Share Posted December 3, 2004 acpi=off is the correct form for that command. You might try 'vgalo acpi=off noapic nodma'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest mjcoates Posted December 6, 2004 Report Share Posted December 6, 2004 Yes. Turn off dma, "nodma" <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well we're getting a little bit further ahead! I used the "vgalo nodma" options and this certainly fixed the installation hangup. I got the system installed but, unfortunately, it doesn't recognize the root partition even though I formatted it as ext3! fsck doesn't recognize it either and so I get no further than trying to mount / at bootup. Dell has a small partition (hda1) which has got corrupted and so I can't even boot into Windows. I'll try and repair this first before trying to re-install 10.1. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted December 6, 2004 Report Share Posted December 6, 2004 Those little proprietary partitions can be a problem. Make sure the boot manager is installed into a the appropriate boot partition, and not that dumb dell id partition. Try reinstalling without the dell partition, but, the software they provide ususally is not really windows, but is the dell version with a complete setup disk. It makes the funky ID partition so that you can't use the software with any other computer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest mjcoates Posted December 8, 2004 Report Share Posted December 8, 2004 Those little proprietary partitions can be a problem. Make sure the boot manager is installed into a the appropriate boot partition, and not that dumb dell id partition. Try reinstalling without the dell partition, but, the software they provide ususally is not really windows, but is the dell version with a complete setup disk. It makes the funky ID partition so that you can't use the software with any other computer. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Thanks guys. Initially, I abandoned Windows to make sure that I could get 10.1 installed. I did but lots of hassles with it so I've returned to 10.0 - I'll start a new topic about that! I then tried to reinstall Windows but, surprise surprise, I had to wipe the entire disk first to do it. Anyway I created a FAT32 partition for it and then installed 10.0 using the nodma argument in the rest of teh hard drive. This time, things worked!! I now have a dual boot system! Trying to setup the new Windows XP is crap but Mandrake is now as good as I expected it to be. Mike Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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