I do not really know if it is a software or hardware issue, so putting it into "Linux - General".

The problem is that I cannot install Linux to my hard drive. I tried Mandriva 2007, 9.1, 8.1, SuSE 10.1 - no success.
At the same time I can run Live CDs smoothly and without problems (I ran Knoppix 3.4 and Mandriva One 2007).

I cannot say that my hardware is rare or weird: MB Asus P5GDC-V Deluxe BIOS 1011.006, CPU Intel Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with Hyperthreading, RAM Corsair ValueSelect 3Gb, HDD 160 Gb SATA Seagate ST3160023AS + 400 Gb SATA Seagate ST3400620AS, DVD Nec ND-2500A, Intel 82915G onboard video.

Installing Mandriva or SuSE from DVD breaks in the process.
Mandriva boots from DVD, allows to configure all parameters, starts installation process and then at some point says "Error installing package ..." (package can be different each time).
SuSE also boots from DVD without problems, and breaks trying to find list of packages on the DVD.
To make sures that this is not a problem with DVD I burned them to different blanks and I scanned them after burning - no errors, all DVDs are perfectly readable in Windows.
And yes, I checked md5sum for all downloaded ISOs.

Ok, next thing I tried was burning Mandriva 2007 One live CD and booting from it. It worked. I ran "Install Mandriva One to HDD". It worked perfectly fine again! Great, I restarted the PC and tried to boot from HDD. No luck - during the boot I got:

Mounting root filesystem /dev/root
mount: error 6 mounting ext3 flags default

followed by kernel panic.

Well, I booted the live cd again and tried to mount the ext3 partition created during installation. It mounted and I was able to see all the files created there, and fsck it (no problems found).

After scanning Internet I tried several different approached trying to fix the partition and make it boot:

1) I rebuilt initrd image to remove suspend2 entries there (someone suggested that these entries should be before any mounts of real physical drives) - no luck, same messages during boot

2) I noticed that the kernel shipped with Mandriva 2007 has ext2 support compiled in, but only supports ext3 as a module, so I tried changing initrd image so that it mounted root filesystem as ext2 rather then ext3 - same problems during boot

3) I recreated the partions and reformatted them as ext2 from the live CD - same messages

Now I am completely lost. I cannot find any other suggestions on the Internet so I am asking for help here.

I dowonloaded Mandriva 2007 version from a FTP site. It was a 64 bit version. I couldn't install it. Then I bought it by buying a copy of the Linux Magazine. It had some other problems. It didn't recognize the mouse.

I send an email to the people who made it. They want people to contact them if there is a problem. They never reply.

I fixed the problem with booting Linux from SATA drive.

My two SATA drives were connected like this:

160Gb drive with Windows - SATA Port 1 - sda
400Gb drive for Linux - SATA Port 2 - sdb

I switched the drives, so now 160Gb is on SATA2 (sdb) and 400Gb is on SATA1 (sda).

Linux is now able to install to and boot from sda.

This is strange because motherboard documentation states that SATA1 and SATA2 are both bootable (SATA3 and SATA4 are not). Windows does not have problems booting from SATA2 either, but whatever, it works now...

AT the same time I still have problems installing Linux and generally reading data from DVD, which can be easily read in Windows from the same drive.

*********************************

I had a similar problem with a SATA RAID on a ASUS m2npv-vm motherboard, and after moving the HD to the SATA1 and SATA2 it installed and booted perfectly, thanks!

Problem:
"Mandriva 2007 Spring ONE KDE" cannot boot after hardisk install from the live CD.

Solution:
Reference: http://www.nabble.com/--on-LVM---Can...tf3867757.html

According to the above forum threads, the problem is related to LVM (linux volume manager) support issue and recreating "initrd-kernelname.img" will solve the problem. After I have followed the procedures mentioned there, I have finally been able to boot into my Mandriva. My steps are slightly different from those mentioned in the forum, where the solution giver advised to use "Live CD". In my case, since I was inside my ubuntu partition, I've just used it to "chroot". The detail steps I went through were as follows:

1. mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb3 /media/sdb3
(/dev/sdb3 is where I've installed Mandriva One and my current ubuntu is resided on /dev/sda6)
2. mount --bind /proc /media/sdb3/proc
3. mount --bind /sys /media/sdb3/sys
4. mount --bind /dev /media/sdb3/dev
5. chroot /media/sdb3
(I was found myself in bash3.1# prompt. "pwd" has assured me that I was in chrooted shell.)
6. cat /etc/fstab
(This gave me "/dev/sdb3 / ext3 defaults 1 1" entry inside and I was confirmed my Mandriva root is correctly set to /dev/sdb3)
7. which lvm2
(This gave me "/sbin/lvm2" and lvm2 was present.)
Here comes the major step:
8. mkinitrd -f /boot/initrd-2.6.17-13mdvlegacy.img 2.6.17-13mdvlegacy
(this took some time.)
9. "ls -l /boot/initrd-2.6.17-13mdvlegacy.img" has confirmed me the newly generated initrd.img presence.
10. "cat /boot/grub/menu.lst" has showed me initrd entry as "initrd (hd1,2)/boot/initrd.img" and since initrd.img is linked to /boot/initrd-2.6.17-13mdvlegacy.img, no changes need to be made in menu.lst.
11. I have restarted my machine and selected Mandriva One from my grub menu. Finally, I have found my Mandriva One booting successfully into KDE 3.5. This has been recorded from this particular Mandriva session.

*I've also found mandriva related threads here in LQ talking about similar issue and the above solution may work for them also.