Poorly Burned Mandrake 8.1 CD?

[gbrux]

Say, I downloaded and burned the three iso cds for Mandrake 8.1.

CD1, the first install, returned the following error message at the start of the install:



quote:
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Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk. This is probably an hardware error while reading the data. (this may be caused by a hardware failure or a Linux kernel bug.)
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The the bottom of the same screen it recommended doing a Alt-F3 to see the logs or Alt-F4 for kernel messages. Upon doing an F3, the last two lines of the logs were: "reading compressed ramdisk: IO-ERROR; Unsetting Automatic."

Upon doing an Alt-F3, the kernel messages were unhelpful.

Other factors: I have a Mandrake 8.0 CD that was burned with the same CD-RW burner (TEAC 512EB), but that was in an Abit BP6 box. Using that Mandrake 8.0 CD, the installation proceeds without incident.

My current box is a MSI K7T266 Pro2-RU. Likewise, the Mandrake 8.0 CD will install without incident on this box.

The first two ISOs of Mandrake 8.1 came from the mirrors at Penn State University, Penn. The third ISO came from the mirror in Tennessee because I discovered that it was faster than the PSU server.

I burned a second CD from the first ISO to create a new install CD, just to test whether corruption occurred in the first burn. The second CD caused the same error message.

Could this be a poor ISO, poorly dowloaded ISO, a poorly burned CD, or a problem that is hardware related?

MSI k7T266 Pro2-RU configuration: Nvidia TNT2 Pro, Athlon XP 1600+, 20 GB Diamondmax Plus 40, 2 x 256 Crucial Micron DDR, TEAC 512EB CDRW, LiteOn 16x DVD Rom. I disabled the Promise IDE RAID controller.

 

[Heisenberg]

Sounds like a bad ISO image. You may try installing another OS besides 8.0 just to make sure its not hardware related. Whenever you download an ISO, its a good idea to run md5sum and verify that its output is what its supposed to be. On linux systems, I think its just md5sum filename. You can download progams for Windows that do the same thing. Compare the string of letters and numbers it outputs with what is on the ftp server (there should be a file named md5sum or checksum in the directory with the ISO's). If it doesn't match exactly, the ISO is bad.

 

[gbrux]

I found the problem. It seems that I did not have a complete download although the download window indicated the the respective ISOs had been downloaded completely.

I have dual boot Windows 98SE and Windows XP pro box. I started the ISO downloads under Win98. Toward the end of each download, I kept getting a message that I was running out of space on my "C" drive, which was the partition where Win98 resided. So, following the instructions in the window, I deleted some "Temporary Internet" files. That should have told me something, but, sometimes our brains lock up like MS operating systems.

The effect was that the ISO files were short of the full complements. Thus, when I burned the CD, it was consequently short as well, i.e., an error producing Mandrake Linux installationg diskette.

I haven't figured out how to adjust this Temporary space problem on C partition. I think I need to point Internet Explorer to a different temporary file.

I move over to Windows XP to do the downloads, and it worked out just fine.

Thanks for the help.