frazer wrote: > As you might guess im new to linux.How many times have you heard that > > My problem is with Mandrake 8.2 .Im trying to install onto a pentium > 3. 450Mhz. 12 Gb Hard drive 128Mb ram.The drive was partitioned with > Partition Magic.Windows 98 being on the drive also.The PM wizard > guided me through the process,moving my windows files to a new > partition 5Gb in size.Which works fine and also creating about a 4 or > bit more Gb partition for linux which i believe needs two separate > partitions > > I also installed boot magic if that matters?.After booting from the > first CD (theres three as it was a download off the net) and starting > ok with the welcome to linux press f1 or f3 i think it is, to install > it goes ok for a while until the message :Error loading program into > memory could not uncompress second stage ramdisk.This is probably "an" > hardware error while reading the data this maybe caused by a hardware > failure or a linux kernal bug in then says press ok but nothing > happens.Iv have tried the four or five commands that are recommended > in the help file "text" "Expert and so on but all cause the same > problem.If its a hardware problem wouldn't it be > causing windows problems? Should i try creating the partitions again > or would you recommend formatting the whole hard disk and starting > fresh. i dont really want that.Thats about it i think. > > If you cant help Thankyou anyway. > > > > > > > > Frazer > Well, you have a media-vs-drive error on the CD drive. It could be media (the CD) or it could be the drive or it could be the speed at which you are running the drive. It has little or nothing to do with your partitioning. It may have been a download or burning problem as well but also it may be that you are using a CDRW which generally makes lousy boot CDs, CD-R being a much better media for iso files.
Did you do a google search for md5sum and get the windows equivalent to check the disk against the md5sum provided on the web? If your iso files check with the md5sum, then we can eliminate the possibility of a transmission error and move on to either media or CD drive. My personal luck has not been good with downloads and CDs. GEnerally I download an iso and burn at three different speeds and try all three and generally I have ONE of those three that will read reliably on another drive. Sometimes CDs I burn on a CDRW won't read cleanly on the CDRW drive itself. I have four burners and about a dozen test drives PD, CD, and DVD, and I get maybe 10% of my burns to read on all of them, and at least 40% of my burns will not read cleanly (data error somewhere) on at least half of my drives. By the way, best approach with PM is to make only the windows partition and leave the rest of the drive unpartitioned, and ditch BootMagic altogether, because Diskdrake can make partitions for you and LILO and GRUB can boot just about any system there is and the mandrake tools for configuring them gives you an easy GUI. If you use BootMagic, you can expect to spend a lot of time fixing what BootMagic does, and the number of folk here who know enough about it here to help will be much smaller than the number who can advise you about LILO or GRUB. Civileme [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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