Have have been trying to install Mandrake 8.0 from a downloaded iso image and
was having the
second stage ramdisk error. A quick search of Google seems to imply that this
error has cropped up
a few times with people but not a lot of substantive information seems to have
been posted as
to what is wrong. So I thought I would post my findings.
First thing is that the CD I had burnt was definitiely corrupted (and I tried
burning 5 copies!).
However the iso image was
downloaded correctly (checksums matched etc.). I was fortunate in having
another linux machine which
I could check things on.
The fault manifested itself as follows,
mount the CD (under windows or linux) all the directories look fine, but if you
try to accesss certain files
(eg Mandrake/base/mdkinst_stage2.bz2 which is the vital one!) you get the
following
cat /mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/base/mdkinst_stage2.bz2
Input/Output error
or if opened in Wordpad
An unexpected error occurred while reading ....
Under Linux, you can then check the kernel messages with dmesg and get lots of
these ...
ATAPI device hdc:
Error: Illegal request -- (Sense key=0x05)
Logical block address out of range -- (asc=0x21, ascq=0x00)
hdc: command error: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdc: command error: error=0x50
end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 1266008
It appears that the file is requesting block beyond the end of the CD.
However, you can check that the image is correct by (for experts this bit)
copying the image into a partition of
its own on the disk (I have a partition /cdimage for holding stuff to burn on
to cd) and issuing a command
something like
mount -o loop -t iso9660 /cdimage/Mandrake80-inst.iso /mnt/cdrom/
which makes the computer think the file is a CD (Ah! the wonders of linux) and
this works fine (in fact I did this
and performed a network install on my new machine from this image)
So what is going wrong? In short I don't know - the cd software doesn't declare
an error but the CD is
clearly not being burnt correctly. Could it be the image is taken from the
larger format CD/RW (is it 90mins?) rather that the standard 74 min CD/RW ?
Maybe someone from Mandrake could comment?
Hope this helps
Matthew Clemence
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