I am having installation problems with several diffrent distro's and am not certain how to proceed.

I have resurected an old box to use as a linux test box. K-6 II @ 333MHZ, 256 mb ram, 4 GB HD. I have successfully run Knoppix 5.01 Live and Ubuntu 6.06 Live.

I succesfully installed DSL to my hard drive but was not able to get my sound card or printer to work properly. so I tried to HDD install Ubuntu. The installation hung up at the 2% progress bar and refused to do anything...to make a long story short, I went back to DSL Live and could not mount the Hard drive. The partitions were "corrupted" so I had to down;oad and install gparted to gain controll of the hdd.

Frusterated I tried to HDD insatll knoppix. That also "hung". Still frusterated I tried Slackware 10.something or another. And it hung up and froze.

When using a live CD or DSL I didn't have any problems with the system freezing up.

I have already tried to re-download, burn at a slower speed, check md5sum. I have also tried the ubuntu alternate/text install disk.

I'm leaning towards bad sectors on the hdd but I can't figure out how to check for and mark them and if I did all of the installers by default try to repartition the hdd.

Anyone have suggestions of comments.

If you need more information to help me diagnose please tell me step-by-step what you need me to do.

I failed to mention..there is nothing of value on the hdd so I wont feel bad if i completly wipe it. I'm not married to any particular distro. I do have access to another hdd but its only 1.5 gb and I don't want to add any money to this computer.

When I installed DSL I couldn't do it with grub but lilo worked.

Update:

I reran gparted and made one massive ex2 partition. I used the shell to run { fsck -f -y /dev/hda1 } Than I created /dev/hda5 and formatted it as swap.

I am reattempting to install slackware 10.2 In the set up portions I did block check and both partitions passed. I have moved forward to the Installing packages portion and am letting it do a full install. The system appears to be hung up....however after reading about slow installations I am just going to walk away and eat dinner.

Good luck with that. Might be a good idea to get your hdd manfacturer's diagnostic software, most companies have it in bootable iso form on their sites. Barring that UBCD has scads of tools for testing drives. Sounds like you reformatted at least once, so I doubt it's just screwed up partitions, but I have seen drives get pretty freaky because their boot sectors have been corrupted. I rarely use gparted, prefer cfdisk (found on a slack disk), but again I doubt that's the problem. Good luck!

Thanks for pointing me to the manufactur....sometimes we overlook the obvious.

I repartitioned usind fdisk / cfdisk on slack disk....partitions set ok. Still coundnt get anything installed.

(I have now added a barebones Debian installation to the list of attempts.

I used the Manuf. (Samsung) tool to low leval format and write 0's.

I am goint to try debian one more time tonight. Depending on the results I might have to scrounge a "new" HDD.

Still no joy

HDD tests OK...still can't complete an installation.

I am going to look into doing a thin (DSL, Puppy, etc) installation and than adding the individual components that I need.

/Linux its more than an OS its an adventure

I wanted to try debian again...however I increased my swap file

OLD Config
256mb Ram
hda1 ext3 3.8GB
hda5 Swap (type 82) 200mb

Current config
256mb Ram
hda1 ext3 3.5GB
hda5 Swap (type 82) .5GM

This allowed the install to proceede further but still won't complete. It is hanging at "Installing Debian base system,,,28%,,,Extracting passwd"

I am going to increase the swap even more and see if installation progresses.

On my last attempt to install a major distribution (debian) I noticed right before the system hung a quick error message at the prompt near the bottom of the screen wich said something to the effect of "bus error".

My final decision was to reinstall Damnsmalllinux and bloat it with debian (synaptic) packages.

FWIW,k here are my hardware details incase someone else has similar problems.

Homebuilt PC:
MOBO: FIC VA-503A
CPU: AMD K6-2 @333mhz
RAM: Kingston 128mb PC100/133 x2
HDD: Samsung SV0432D
CD: Memorex (will add model later)

Distros Attempted:
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Live (Ordered from cannonical)
Ubuntu-6.06.1-alternate-i386 (from web)
Knoppix 5.01CD (from web) using sudo knoppix-installer
Slackware 10.2 (burned from Linux Bible / Chris Neagus 2006)
Debian (Unk)(burned frim Linux Bible / Chris Neagus 2006)

I know it's probably too late now, but I wonder if you would have been able to get a distro to install by passing kernel parameters in the GRUB/LILO screen? I've had Live CDs in the past that work, but hang on an actual install. Passing things like noide (I can't remember any of the other drive kernel parameters at the moment) sometimes works.

There's quite possibly half a half-baked answer...

Heatsink - Thanks for the idea. I may try to play around with that this weekend. Because I don't have anything of value on the computer I don't mind giving it a try.

I'll report back with results

Cool. I'd love to know how it pans out.

Success...finally.

I purchased a "new" tower from a co-worker to canabalize for parts. Cost $20

I pulled the lan/ethernet card for my sisters computer (breaking even on the price).

On a whim I put the 20GB HDD in my linux box...put the Ubuntu Alternate install disk in the CD tray and 2 hours 30 minutes later I am running on Ubuntu 6.06.1

Best I can figure there was something wrong with the "original HDD" No Idea what but using a "new" HDD fixed my problems.

Next project Samba...