Hello,

I'm trying to install Mandrake 10.0 official from CD on to a Dell Demsion L600 with a Intel Celeron 600 192MB ram, 10GB HD, onboard vid and LAN.

Knoppix works fine, and the MandrakeMove did work but doesn't work anymore either.

The machine does have WinXP Pro and the HD is partitioned 4.5GB NTFS for the XP and the balance as unallocated

When I try to install, it freezes virtually at the start...

I boot from the CD and I get the screen to select 'F1' or 'Enter'. I've tried both, but here is what happens after I go the 'press Enter' route...

Screen goes black and starts line item listing of what it's doing, but stops and completely freezes after the following...

hda: max request size 128KiB

Additional info that may or may not be relative:
-The XP installation works fine
-Had a very similar problem when I tried Fedora (just to see). It stopped after the line:

SELinux: Registering Netfilter Hooks

-I have used the CDs to successful install of other machines.
- The checksums for the CDs is correct

Please Help!

P.S. Be gentle! 10 days of Linux experience - 10 years of Wondoze brainwashing

Don't know... Have several mdk 10 installs here no problem...

the line:
hda: max request size 128KiB

is a normal output and the next output would be to do with the partition table, so I'm wondering in the install is having trouble with the partition table?

I'd suggest booting with knoppix and see what the partition table looks like with

fdisk -l /dev/hda

and maybe that will give some hints?

Try using the F1 and type in expert noauto then press enter. If it is freezing while trying to detect your firewire/usb which is common on many machines, this will bypas the ´auto´ hardware detection. You may have to play with some modprobe commands to get those devices working after the installation but it would at least allow you to install. If you can, try to disable ACPI in BIOS also, if that helps then try enabling it afterward.

im havin a bit of trouble myseft with the installation early too....when it gets to the hardware detection of the installation it just stops...the cd and everything...and sits there....can you help me???haha

-Keith

lol

ok

amosf:

I booted in Knoppix and pulled up the partition table using fdisk. All the was there is...

name boot start end file system
hda1 * 1 614 HPFS/NTFS

The total number of sectors for the drive 1214.

One strange thing is Knoppix has a dev/hda5 icon of the desktop, but it shows as being read only and empty.

BIACS:

Tried the 'expert noauto'. Installation freezes in the same place.

Tried to disable ACPI in the BIOS. Absolutely no reference to ACPI in the BIOS, so I couldn't disable it.

Additional info:

When booting in Knoppix and then when booting (trying to) from the Mandrake CD1, I noticed the following error 20 some odd lines before the point it freezes.

PCI: Error while updating region 0000:01:09.0/0 (10000000 != 00000000)

xMSFTjunkie

HD partition must be okay then I would think. I was thinking it might be screwed up...

Is the MDK 10 on CD-R and maybe faulty? I used to have trouble there so get mine on pressed CD... The CD-R you buy aren't the best sometimes...

Or did you burn it yourself (more likely to be okay if burned in your own drive).

I'm at a bit of a loss here

If you did burn it yourself, did you burn it at the drives default speed setting? If you did, then try another disk and burn it slower (8x or 10x) and see if that helps.

I did burn the CDs myself, but on a different machine. I have used the same set of CDs to now complete 7 successful installs. It's just this one machine and always at the exact same spot. And this particular machine is not the most recent attempt.

I almost think it's faulty hardware (maybe HD controller) but the WinXP works. And it was a new install just a week earlier.

I'm like soooooo confused.

Okay, thanks. Just trying the process of elimination...

And it does appear to be drive or controller related, but can't say I've ever seen anything like that...

Could you pull a CD Rom out of another box and temporarily swap it out with the one in that machine? Just sit it on top of the case and run the ribbon and power cable up to it.