Hi, I'm trying to add mandrakelinux 10.1 to my laptop, but seem to be having problems that I'm not sure if it is normal. Every single step of the installation process takes forever. I have nothing connected to my laptop besides items that are part of the laptop. The only item I leave connected is a wireless card, but disconnected it because I thought it might have been the problem.
When I first boot the CD to start installation, the process seems to run smooth and without problem. As soon as it goes to the part where it says "Loading program into memory...", it takes a total of 2 hours before it is finally done! No exaggeration on time, it really did take 2 hours. After that, it finally gets to the GUI part where everything is straight forward, but again, every step takes forever. When in the GUI part of the install, the first problem I notice is that my touchpad was recognized, but it jumps everywhere. I really hope it goes away after install. Then when I select the language and click next, it takes 20-40mins before I get the agreement part (or choose security screen name?). After that, another 20-40mins until I can get to the next step. The last step that I seem to get stuck on is the partition step. The first time I got to this step, it wasn’t able to resize my windows XP partition, so I cancelled the installation and used partition magic to resize XP partition and give about 20 gigs for Linux to use. So during the second time I reached partition step, it wasn’t able to format the partition left there for linux by partition magic. So I deleted it and used the auto allocate feature to let mandrakelinux decide what would be good. I left it there overnight before it finally said that I need to restart computer before partitions take effect. After I clicked ok, it took another 4 hours before the laptop restarted.
I’m currently on the 3rd step right now and wanted to ask if anyone could tell me if it’s normal or is something seriously wrong? Maybe an incompatible hardware? Did I forget something? I REALLY want to get linux on my laptop, so I’m persistent and just let the laptop running while I run errands.
If anyone can give me any help at all, that would be great! If everything will be ok after the installation, then all this wouldn’t be in vain. Oh, by the way, the laptop’s harddrive and CD-ROM doesn’t seem to make normal active sounds like it does when it’s loading. During the whole process of the installation, active sounds from the CD-ROM comes every minute or so and it’s a VERY slight sound. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the harddrive make any sound at all. Weird.

That is definitely not normal but I have no experience with laptops to answer yoiur question as to why.
Hopefully someone more experienced will answer

Thanks for your reply, and now I can confirm that I do have a problem. Just finished my 3rd attempt in installing Linux, and still the same problem with SUPER slow installation. This time though, it confirmed that there’s probably a problem in the partitioning part of the installation and the way memory is used. I again for the 3rd time got stuck when trying to either resize a partition, or format the partition created. Would there be a reason why I’m not able to format the partition?

What are the specs on your laptop?

How are you installing? Bought disks, downloaded disks, ftp?

mattmc

I have a sony PCG-GRT100. Win XP SP2 with NTFS file system. Pentium 4 2 Ghz M processor, 40 Gig HD, 512MB RAM, Nvidia Geforce4 420 Go, DVD reader/CD-ROM re-writable, and no floppy drive.

I downloaded the ISOs from the internet and burned them to CD (3 disks total). Oh, and I forgot to mention that I had the 10.1 Community version. I'm downloading the Official version as we speak to see if it will work.

Anyone have any idea what could be wrong?

try useing knoppix first. you dont install anything but it will give you and idea on how well it will run on your system. keep in mind not all hardware works with linux. suse 9.1 and 9.2 run perfectly on my compaq presario 700US. however older versions didn't like the sound card and ACPI. FC still has issues with it. Mandrake may not work out of the box. try shutting off ACPI.
other than that i am out of my area. maybe try another distribution. mandrake is fairly good and being great for new users.

yeah it could be a hardware issue, MDK tries to autodetect hardware. I've never had a problem like you're describing, while installing MDK 10.1.

You can try to boot to knoppix as suggested above and see how it runs with that. and also shutting the acpi option either at boot, or at install may help. -noacpi at install iirc.

Thanks guys for the reply! If I can't get mandrakelinux official to work, i'll probably give suse a try. I'm looking into knoppix right now and will probably use that too to help see if there's something wrong with my computer with linux.
So the command to disable ACPI is "-noacpi"? When during the install should I type it? Don't really recall a time when I'm able to type commands. Just to be sure, is ACPI power management?

hit either F2 or F3 for more help on commands to pass during install. I believe it would be SMP -noacpi, or linux, or something, F2 i think will tell you what kernels you can choose, and F3 should tell you the options. to pass it at boot would be acpi=off or something to that effect. Yeah ACPI Stands for Advanced Configuration and Power Interface.

Some older motherboards do not support that feature, which is why you would have to set the switch at install/boot.

I just tried out Knoppix today and everything worked smoothly with my laptop. There wasn't any problems with hardware detection or with ACPI. Now I'm trying Mandrakelinux 10.1 official, and it's still REALLY slow with installation. This time though, I pressed F4 to get kernal messages, and I keep seeing this over and over again:

<6>ide-cd: cmd 0x28 timed out
<4>hdc: DMA interrupt recovery
<4>hdc: lost interrupt

It's always there everytime I check kernal messages.

Could anyone tell me what this could mean? I think I recall that hdc was the CD-ROM drive on the laptop. Not exactly sure though.
I'm waiting for SUSE 9.1 to finish downloading now, and will probably give that a try if I can't get MDL to work.

Hit F1 at the beginning of the install and type the following to start the install
linux ide =nodma

I recall reading some threads about dma causing an install problem. Google for something like linux mandrake dma install problem and see what you come up with.

what type of drive is hdc? ATAXXX

I just tried using "linux ide =nodma" at startup, but still got the lost interrupt problem and it still installed very slow. I'll try and search up on this dma problem and see if it might be connected with my problem.

The drive is a ATAPI.
If it helps, the cd drive was shown as UJDA740 2048K Cache 24x DVD/CD Rom.

Give Slack a shot, if you've gotten this far, Slack install will be easy as pie, just not as flashy.

I'm new to linux, so can you explain what slack is and how to do it? I REALLY want to install linux and it'll benefit me to figure out this problem, so I'm willing to try anything possible.