Mandrake Hangs on Loading Program into memory.
 

Hey guys, new linux user just starting out, I've been running suse 9.1 on my laptop for a little while and I wanted to load Mandrake on my old desktop to test out samba and make an ssh server and a couple other things just to try it out.

Anyway while I started loading mandrake 10.1 and on the part where it says "loading program into memory" it hangs, and after a little while I get an error that states... "Fatal Error Finsihing Initialization"

Pressing Alt-F3 to see logs I see...

trying to load /sysroot/tmp/image/install/stage2/mdkinst_stage2.bz2 as a ramdisk
fopen(stage1.c383) failed: I/O error
unsetting automatic

Pressing Alt-F4 to see logs I see...

Basically a bunch of repeating...

Buffer I/O error on device hda, logical block (number)
hda media error (bad sector): status=0x51 {DriveReady Seek Complete Error}



Any ideas?

I tried a second hard drive/cdrom and distro (red hat 9 fails on completely random packages about an hour into a full install)


Thanks...

You say you've tried a different harddrive/cd-rom drive already? because this does sound like a bad drive (the cd-rom in particular), but it could also be that the cd you have is bad. did you burn it yourself, and did you check it before burning? i've had many problems in the past that I could have avoided if I only knew the power of the dark side.. I mean, checking the md5sum's of the ISO files I burned ;)
Also, did you try swapping RAM modules for others, or different sockets?

Suggestion
 

I've had the same problem happen to me, buddy, try this:
Press F1 this would bring you to a command / option prompt
Chose the advanced help by pressing F2 ( i believe )
Then type in: Vgahi noauto
that's the trick that worked for me.
Hope it works. E-mail me to see if it works.
PEACE