Hey,

I just tried to install Mandrake Linux 9.2 again and am encountering a quite irritating problem. Although the install CD boots fine, shows the splash screen, and will go through the initial bit of loading (the white progress bar on the splash screen), after this it all goes wrong. On the 'Loading program into memory' screen my DVD drive (an AOpen) starts doing the dreaded repeating 'whirr-click' and doesn't actually do anything apart from the very rare tiny bit of activity I can see on its LED. Shortly afterwards I get a 'Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk' error. On pressing 'Enter' the installer goes to a fresh command line, and the 'whirr-click' continues until the installer gives an unrecoverable I/O error (I can't remember the exact text).

Any ideas? The odd thing is that before I could actually get into the installer proper despite the 'Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk' error. I think the only thing that has changed since then is that I have deleted an Extended DOS partition in FDISK.

One thing to note (may or may not be useful) is that I have had problems with floppy disk access, with BIOS/Win98 both failing to make use of a floppy drive, even if it is the fake one 'created' by an LS-120 drive. I can boot and read from the device marked and assigned as LS-120 though.

Has this particular CD (Both hardware and the media) ever worked? If you, or someone else burned the CD, were the MD5SUM's checked before burning? Lots of bizarre behavior can be traced back to bat downloads and burns.

Only other thing I would do is check the hardware compatibility for your system on the Mandrake site. Make sure that is not the problem. CD's today are not much of a problem though.

It must be the drive, because I put the CD into my CD-RW drive and it worked OK. I must admit that drive has been prone to doing irritating things like those noises over the years... It works in Mandrake proper though. (Just installed it now, heh).