Auran

Me again - 3 weeks ago i authored the thread "Mandrake 9.2 takes days to install". Anyway - care of the users on this board i have had some degree of success - even if it was rather a long way round. Firstly someone here provided me with the checksum values that let me know my d/l corrupted. AussieJohn was gracious enough to send me a ton of 9.2 related disks. Armed with the correct disks i started to install. Lots went wrong. It crashed on webmin or webmem and kept returing me to the screen where you pick your packages. Some files it got stuck on (png files!) and it crashed heaps on openoffice.org. I rebooted and started again - more input output errors. At this point i decided to put my old cdrom to rest so i pulled it out and put a newer burner in. I also found some longer ide cables so i could put the cdrom on its own channel. Restarted the installation - more errors, webmin/mem and input/output. The install kept wanting to reformat the drive and then kept having an error when it tried to do it. Rebooted... no hdd detected... In bios no primary master. Pulled out the hdd and put in another one. Fdisked it. Formatted it. Started linux installation. 2 or 3 little errors that i just skipped passed and within the hour was using kde (i feel more at home in kde than in xp - well xp before i make it look and act like win98...). Now the issue i'm having is - in any way, shape or form can a stuffed linux install stuff a HDD? My thinking was that it was just bad timing - the drive failed - its an old component, from a school computer that was kept for 2 years in a dusty room because something went wrong with it in the first place... but i could load windows on it and used it a fair bit. Also from all this i am thinking that just because windows will load with certain components (old and dodgy) that sometimes linux wont - as if it is more sensitive to potentially failing hardware? Thanks again to everyone that commented and a massive thank you to AussieJohn for sending me the disks!

AussieJohn sounds like what the doctor ordered - i've pm'd him. Thanks all - i should get around to playin with it after easter - let you know how i went. A.

thnx all (special thnx for artee for the checksums - i'll do them when i get home) some things have changed since my last post - due to some work i am doing for the local school i have come into some new bits of hardware 192Mb ram 2x10Gb hdd 52x CD-ROM I'll checksum the ISOs and then burn them at <10x (additionally i have gotten specific instructions for some settings in Nero which, if they arnt default, got left out last time) and move the cdrom to master/secondary. Part of the problem with dialup is it takes several sessions to ftp the files - does resuming an ftp typically create a corruption? The other thing i did (with the second cd and probably shouldn't have) is swap ftp servers during the download. Since all the distros of 9.2 should have, in theory, the same checksums no matter what server hosts them can i assume that i could resume an unfinished download from any of server? Failing that i am on holiday in a little over a week and am off to a city where they have cool things like mcdonalds and theatres and ocean views where i will try and pick up a mandrake pac - these are usually like $20 (about $10 US) and come with a booklet on installation and the 3 cds - these shouldn't have any of the probs the downloaded ones can develop. After that i guess its down to 10.0 which if i really hook in will only take me a week to get. This box will be linux :)

I'm thinking its more a disk/rom issue. I stopped the install and rebooted - opting to start the procedure again. When you first load and press enter the screen is black and you can press altF1, altF3 and altF4 (kernal msg) well i pressed altF4 and it showed a whole screen of <3>hdb: lost interrupt and back on the front screen it shows "trying to access Mandrake Linux CD-ROM (Pioneer ATAPI model DR-A24X - 0104)" I'm thinking it should do this pretty quickly whereas the first time when i just left it this part took like 30 minutes... So maybe the disk or the rom are shagged? I used a windows md5 checker - futher research sets up persuasive arguments not to do this so i've gotten http://www.theopencd.org/md5sum.exe but now that 10.0 is out i cant find the values for 9.2 AHHHHH If i cant find the 9.2 values i will try another cd-rom and failing that i guess its ftp time again to get 10.0... (dialup...)

Hi from outback Australia! new to the linux community and would very much like to stay but i am having one basic drama... I have mandrake 9.2 on 3cds which all checked fine and i want to install them on a system: amd 700 128mb Ram 4gig HDD Panasonic 24speed cdrom (oldest component but seems fine in windows) Riva TNT 2 32mb Network Card (super generic) The motherboard is for a baby AT - one of the later boards that has usb and sound onboard. I started mandrake at 8:30pm and it took until 10pm before it started to actually install - i was willing to give it that time to load itself into memory and format drives and whatnot but the problem is it is now 12 hours later and the install bar is only 3/5ths of the way to complete - when you show up details it is doing something (the prog bar for the current package moves and the text updates) and if you leave it for hours you can see that the bar has moved... I'm assuming this isn't a typical scenario (2 days to install mandrake? cant find anything like this on the net...) and would like some feedback. The only package/s (in addition to the default ones) i checked was LAN client - the installer said it would take up 1.14gig... The only other additional information i can think that is relevant is that it wouldn't boot from the cd (so i made the floppy as per instructions) and at a real stretch the rom and hdd are on the same ide (but i mean - seriously?) Other than that it is just a nice basic lil machine that doesn't normally have issues - just been letting it chug through at its own pace... Any help would be much appreciated.