Okay, I've successfully installed Mandrake 9.0 on my computer and is currently dual booting it along with Windows XP. Had have absolutely NO hitches with installation and the maintenance of both.

I tried installing a "fresh" Mandrake 9.1 on my computer today and the first error I ran into was....

"Could not compress second stage ramdisk... don't remember end of message"

I rebooted.. thought it might have been the CD. So I burned a new Mandrake 9.1 Installation CD 1.

Rebooted, went back into the installation screen... it said "loading program into memory" longer than it had previously. Then after about 15-20 mins i get another error...

"Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk" (i'm PRETTY sure this one said uncompress but not sure about first error being compress.. it was what i wrote down at the time)

I let it keep running.. it runs... and runs.. and runs...

THEN I get a............

Error in exec of stage 2:C
Trying to execute '/usr/bin/runinstall2 from installation volume,
The following fatal error occured:
FATAL ERROR IN STAGE1: I/O Error

I can't recover from this
You may reboot your system.



Anyone know what's wrong? Mandrake 9.0 install perfectly. =\

Comp Specs:

Dell Dimension 8100

P4 1.5 GHz
512 MB of RAM
Geforce3
A somewhat new DVD-ROM
A semi-really-old CD-RW Burner (I could always burn another cd on my brother's brand new cd burner...)
a 40 GB Harddrive
a 60 GB Harddrive


Any help would REALLLLY be appreciated.. thanks.

Try burning the media first on the brand new burner.

Where are you getting the iso's from?

Download ISO from... http://www.thetechguide.com/

Ran the md5sum after I downloaded and checked out okay.

I'll try burning the ISOs on the newer burner tomorrow.

you also might try www.linuxiso.org.

I am pretty happy with their results.

To ask the forum or download new ISOs? lol I think i might try downloading a different set of ISOs and seeing if those work.

To download new iso's. You might also invest in a cdrw (while they are still reasonably priced) to make master copies of the iso's. Have you tried Redhat yet?

Redhat 8 wouldn't install for me. =\

First distro I tried was Debian.. I didn't make it pass install.. but i managed to screw up my partition table so i had to reformat everything lol

Mandrake 9.0 installed without a glitch.. so i stuck with it

See I had problems with mandy 9.
Plus I like having the sources on disc for my distro.
And when I tried to install vmware I found out they were using different source files than the kernel released with mandy 9.
I just kinda got turned off by that.

If the ISOs i'm downloading from linuxISO.org has the same problem and i can't figure out how to solve it.. i'm probably going to try redhat again.. or something lol

well email me if you get stuck