The install gets just past the USB detection and then crashes

I'm doing the install from DVD

I get this message in a dialog box:

Trying to access Mandrake Linux CDROM disc (drive DW-224E)

Thats where it hangs, at the bottom of the screen it says 'exited abnormally received signal 11

Can anyone help ?

Thanks

Did you download the DVD ISO, is it a purchased DVD or a coverdisk from a magazine?

Have you performed a successful install on another machine with this disk?

I ask these questions to rule out a problem with the disk itself.

It was bought off Ebay and this is the first install.

Thanks,

Disk has been checked by nero and is OK

I had a similar problem trying to install both Mandrake 9.2 and 10.0 on a computer with an Sis chipset. After considerable diagnosis, I determined that the IDE controller in the montherboard is not supported by linux, although RedHat 9.0 seemed to like it. I am now in the process of finding a PCI IDE controller card to plug in, and disable the onboard controller.
This may not be the problem you are encountering, but it is worth checking out. I eventually plugged the hard drive in another computer, installed Mandrake 9.2 (no problems at all on a gigabyte MB with VIA chipset), and then plugged it back in the original computer. I got as far as the very first bootup screen after Lilo, and nothing was happening at all. I pressed Alt-F1 to see the bootup log, and there were dozens of messages about DMA timer elapsed, timeout failures and other errors are relating to hda. I hope this is of some help.
Andrew

Thanks for your reply.

I just couldn't get it to play at all and when it's on a Laptop you're fairly limited with regards to swapping components etc as you'll understand.

I decided to bin the idea of Mandrake and installed SUSE 9.0 Professional instead which went on without a hitch, apart from my Wireless Belkin card which is a bit of an issue wih loads of other people anyway.

Thanks for your time,

SDM

I have only just seen this, but the following worked for me and may be useful to anyone else having the same problem. I went from Mandrake 8.2 to 10.0 Official. It seems to work best if you do an install rather than an upgrade, and do a minimal install. The original problem in my case seemed to be something to do with SCSI drivers.

1. Copy the whole of CD 1 to your hard disk (you need to have a working system already).
2. Make a floppy using hd_grub.img on CD 1.
3. Go to http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/hd_grub.cgi and follow the instructions. When told to copy the file to a floppy, use the one you have just created.
4. Boot from the floppy.
5. Follow the onscreen instructions. When prompted, enter the path where you put the copy of CD 1.

When you have finished, put CD 1 into the drive and enter the following as root, to make all of the CDs available:
urpmi.addmedia --distrib removable://mnt/cdrom

One more oddity - soft reboots do not work after installing as above (hard reboots do). The system hangs after the message "Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.". I don't know what causes this, but it is not a serious problem because pressing reset at this point boots normally.

john2...

thanks for the tip... i've the same problem and your method is the closest i've come to installing mdk... however after entering the path of the files from cd1 it says that the installation needs more memory to install from a windows partition... it suggests i copy the files to a linux ext2 partition and install from there... but how do i do that since i only have win98se installed which doesnt recognise ext2?? btw i have 64mbram on this box..

i have already partitioned the hardisk ... made a 4.8gig ext2 partition and a ~200mb swap partition... how can i get it to use the swap partition to install... or can i??

thanks..

Good question ...

To state the obvious, you need something that can see both your FAT32 and ext2 partitions. You could try Minux, which fits on a floppy disk - see http://www.online-center.com/minux/

You should then be able to mount both partitions and do the copy. (Disclaimer - I have never tried Minux).

Alternatively, you could install a distro other than MDK 10 just to do the copy - I had MDK 8.2 running OK on the machine that gave the problem. You would only need to install a minimal system.