5 distros later and i still cant install
Hi all,
If anyone could point me in the right direction here I would be most grateful. System: Gigabyte ga-8penxp mobo Pentium 4c 2.6GHz 1 GB DDR 400 geforce mx4 20gb excelstore hard disk (no floppy drive) I downloaded gentoo Linux and attempted to install it via it's nice GUI installer. It got half way through then it simply sat there for the next 4 hours doing nothing, no error message, nothing. I worked out that obviously the installer had hung. Okay, I’ll try something else. Downloaded xandros and….. an error message ‘500’ appeared ‘unable to install, restarting system’ appeared. Dag, not having much luck here. Okay, Fedora Core 4! It’s looking good! Not quite… the installer failed when attempting to partition the drive. The error message which appeared was something about a serious error occurring which prevented the installer continuing then the words VolGroup00/LogVol00 appeared. Okay, I’ll bite the bullet and buy a linux magazine which a distro on it. Madriva 2006. Inserted the CD, and the following error message appears: ‘Unable to mount loop filesystem’ then the PC just hangs. I read somewhere on this forum that this is to do with a bad burn? On a magazine cover disc? As you can guess I’m a total linux n00b. I’m desperate use it, but I just cant get it to work. Is there something blatantly wrong I am doing here? I just don’t seem to be having any luck at all with linux. |
If you have trouble with that many distros, then the odds of it being a **Linux** issue are just about ZERO.
First: What is on the machine now? Did it have windows? If so, will it still boot into Windows? If you can boot into windows, run a utility to test the hard drive. Depending an the answers to the above--and on your budget--you should seriously consider buying a brand new 80GB drive. 20GB is marginal (for anything) and 20GB also means old which means prone to failure. When you are satisfied that the drive is OK, then Pick ONE distro to work with. If it will not install on your machine, you are not likely to fix that by trying a different distro. For this one distro, you can pretty much pick randomly among Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE Next, go thru the install process and note EXACTLY what the error messages are. On thing caught my attention--with Mandriva you said you inserted the CD and got an error message---You need to **boot from** the CD---is that what you meant to say? |
Hi thanks for replying,
The drive is empty, it's never had windows on it. I did test it out in another machine with windows on and it appeared to be fine, no errors seemed to be apparent. Unfortunately I can't afford to buy a bigger drive, so I'm a bit stuck in that respect. |
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When you have wiped the drive , then boot from one of you LInux CDs and tell us EXACTLY what happens |
Please make sure that your iso images are ok before you burn them. There is always a md5 sum to check that indicates if your iso is the one it should be :)
Chances are worse that the journal CD had errors, but it's not impossible. Checking the md5 sums would help to exclude ONE possible cause for your problems. |
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just burn as an iso |
A valuable tool to have is the ultimatebootcd this not only has tools to partition the drive it also has all sorts of diagnostics, in fact it does exactly what it says on the tin :cool: ;)
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While I would not consider your computer "old" (My computers are all over 5+ years old.) I would suggest that you give Vectorlinux 5.1 Standard a try since Vector is a distro that typically runs well on "older" hardware such as yours (or mine).
However you do need to resolve the hard drive partition issue before you can successfully install any OS. You can D/L the iso from www.vectorlinux.com I recommend Vector because the OS is very stable and the Vector Community is very helpful. Good Luck. |
Getaway thorn168 his hardware is quite capable of running any of the most recent distributions, in fact its better than my computer
Code:
dick@matilda:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo |
Ditto
pixellany and towy71 are both right. Wipe that disc slick and I'm sure any distro you try will install without a problem. Your hardware (if functioning properly) will run any current distro. I spent months distro hopping before I settled on one, and the only one I've ever had a problem with was Vector.
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Perhaps it is the cdrom not the HD?
My best friend tried over 10 distros on an older IBM( not super old it has a 900mhz processor), none would install and most wouldn't even finish booting. The HD had been wiped, it was a computer his company got rid of. Tried win 2000 and it installed just fine. So then he tried PC-BSD and suprisingly it installed as well. |
Criticism aside I would like to hear from the original poster regarding his progress in resolving the issue.
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I suspect this forum is not unusual in attracting a lot of "looky-loo"s---people that are not at all serious about learning and using Linux. One obvious symptom--in this thread--is that, even when he did respond, he did not address all the question put to him. The most extreme is the "one-post hit and run"--thy guy (gal) who posts one question and is never heard from again. The most frustrating is the poster who, after lengthy dialog, and fairly detailed instructions from us, puts up a post that says--"OK, now how do I solve my problem?" I usually learn something here--even fi the OP does not (or does not WANT to) In this case, the OP may be back--he was at least motivated enough to try 5 distros..... |
instead of dban could'nt he try to load a live cd. if that works than his cd-rom is working and from there just
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda to clear the drive. saves a cd :) |
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