well my system was running fine, and then i tried to open KDE and see how different it was from gnome. and soon after that i began to experience freezing and random shut downs. soon i was unable to even reboot my machine, it simply would not go into the x windows system. it would say, "your system appears to have shut down uncleanly, system check commencing" or something. so it would do that, find errors, i would say yes to everything to fix it, and it would say, "no restarting" and do the same thing all over again. so i decided to reinstall.

unfortuneatly, i cant even reinstall it now, ive downloaded three different rh9 cd sets, all apparently saying the cd's were "failed" but i tried them anyways, thinking that my machine was bad from the kde thing and so it told me everything was in bad, which it wasnt.

so does anyone know what i can do? the only thing ive come up with is actually finding or buying the real rh9 install cd's and doing that.

any help will be greatly appreciated! thanks in advance

~warheros

p.s. - install either freezes, turns the screen black, or says bad blocks cannot install on this machine.

my machine:
1.5 GHz
P4 Intel genuine
dell 4300
dual boot with winxp which crashed
512 MB RAM
bios v. A02

This sounds like a hardware problem, most likely with your hard drive or possibly with your IDE chipset.

If you have a hard drive install floppy you should try low level formatting the hard disk. These bootable DOS based install floppies are brand specific. Maxtor puts out one called MaxBlast which will low level format a 40g drive in about 3 hours. As part of the low level format the software will assign bad blocks to spare blocks.

You might be able to do the same thing with mkfs. mkfs -c will check for bad blocks but I do not know what it does about the bad blocks other than report them.

Does the CD "failed" message mean that the CD failed or that the install failed. If the CD fails as well as the HD it may mean that the IDE chipset is faulty.

it says the cd failed when it asks to check them at the beginning of installation. and i dont understand why it's not installing, because ive had rh9 on there before, and when i switched to KDE it all went haywire.

Run mediacheck on another PC, perhaps, at work or with a friend.

Starting KDE might just have been a coincidence.

what is mediacheck?

The CD testing component can be activated at the linux: prompt (CD / floppy) using the linux mediacheck command.

Yeah, check to make sure your CD-Rom isn't whats iffy, too. KDE mighta just crapped out for other reasons -- although it sounds the IDE/HD issues might be more at hand.

mediacheck isnt reliable at the moment, it says every single one of my cd's is a "failed" cd, which isnt true. ive tested them before all this started to happen and they were fine.

so think ill have to fix my bad sectors/blocks before i can do anything like install rh9 again. so does formatting fix bad blocks/sectors? if not, how can i fix that? i believe that that is my problem now. i cannot run mskf -c from boot disk or without it.

i have an 80 gig HD, approx. 30 on the linux/ext3 partition, and the rest on the shared windows/linux fat32 partition. if there's a way to fix my ext3 partition without getting rid of the shared partition that would be cool, so let me know.

You could partition magic away the ext3 partition.... then run some kind of lowlevel format on it...

btw, under windows, you can download an md5summer, and md5sum the isos of the cds and check against redhat. IMHO I think your CD-Drive has crapped out if it sees good CDs as bad...

cant load windows, it crashed. is there like a bootable cd that will format and stuff? clean all my bad sectors/blocks? 'cause i cant find it through google or anything.

"is there like a bootable cd that will format and stuff? clean all my bad sectors/blocks? 'cause i cant find it through google or anything."

There are DOS based floppies put out by the disk manufacturers which will low level format a hard drive. They are manufacturer dependent so look at the support site for your HD manufacturer.
These floppies will assign bad blocks to spare blocks. They will also wipe your HD absolutely clean.

Are you sure your CDROM drive is in perfect working condition?

make sure the iso you downloaded has a correct md5 value... it has to be exactly the same as it is published on the server...

check that the cd was burned correctly... this is done by comparing the md5 value of the original iso image with the md5 value of the cd itself...

if they are not the same, then you have a "coaster"...

here's a good link about this "phenomenon":

http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/coasterless.htm

here are the md5 values for the red hat 9 distro:

ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/redhat/red...iso/i386/MD5SUM