Insallation of Suse 8.1 Professional Fails (But Never Used To!)
 

(Ahead of time, I should note that I posted this to the "Linux From Scratch" distribution's forum, because I thought "Linux From Scratch" was the Newbie forum. I then saw this forum. I already told that forum to ignore my post. Please help me out here! Okay, here goes nothing...)

I had a fully functioning SuSE Linux 8.1 Professional system up and running on my Dell PowerEdge 400SC system. k3b wasn't working though so I couldn't burn CDs. I tried to update it using the latest rpm out on the suse.com site. It complained about me not having several of the need shared objects and I read somewhere that I needed KDE3.1 or later. So, again, I tried to use the latest rpm on the suse.com site. I started having problems where konqueror would not work at all anymore, so I tried to back out KDE updates I made by doing updates to all the KDE modules (using the SuSE Installation CDs I bought).

After that, I could never get back into KDE. I tried everything I could think of to get back into KDE, including writing the suse-linux-e@suse.com lists. As I was able to log in as root as a command line, I tried to update the system via yast and yast2. It made no difference no matter what I tried. I tried updating many different packages to no avail. I ran diagnostics checks on my hard drive and it gave no errors.

Finally, I got frustrated to the point where I decided to try to re-install the system. If I put installation CD 1 into the CD-ROM drive and allowed it to start the installation, it would seemingly detect my hardware, including:

hdc:CD-ROM
hdd:CD-RW
floppy drive

The installation program then would give the following messages (just like this):

integrating the installation system into the ramdisk...
integrating the shared objects of the installation system...
ldconfig: Cannot mmap file /usr/lib/libhd.so.5.

ldconfig: /usr/lib/libhd.so.5.32 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

ldconfig: /usr/lib/libjpeg.so is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

ldconfig: /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.62 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

ldconfig: /usr/lib/libhd.so.62.0.0 is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start.

ldconfig: Cannot mmap file /usr/lib/liblcms.so.

ldconfig: Cannot mmap file /usr/lib/liblcms.so.1.

ldconfig: Cannot mmap file /usr/lib/libpanel.so.5

ldcon
Note the messages from "ldconfig" are not always the same--but they are always of this type with those error messages. The above was the latest attempted install of about 10 attempted installs which all last about 2-3 hours each time.

My thought after trying all these installs was that perhaps the "integrating the shared objects of the installation system..." was referring to the fact that there was a problem with something on my hard drive. So, I used Partition Magic to delete the three (Linux) partitions I had on my hard drive.

When I start my system now, it obviously doesn't boot linux, but Grub still seems to be there.

If I insert CD 1 into the system, and let the Installation run, I get the same problem I described earlier where ldconfig complains about many shared object files.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Sincerely,
wmeler

SOLUTION
 

SOLUTION:

It turned out the reason I couldn't get the installation to work off of the CDs was because of the fact that grub was still on my hard drive (although I know not how, because I did everything I could to re-partition the drive). I just ended up parftitioning the drive using the PowerMax utility from maxtor.com. It's a great tool and I highly recommendi it.
Thanks!
wmeler

P.S. Although I didn't try it, I think fdisk /mbr would work too to kill the master boot record (grub).