I downloaded the release candidate of ubuntu that was released a few days ago. I booted the livecd and launched the installer from it. Everything went fine until it started writing stuff. It made 15% progress installing ext3 filesystem to hda3 for / and then got to 15% installing ext3 filesystem to hda5 for /home. A message then appeared saying something along the lines of "Failed to write ext3 to /hda5, wrong filesystem". When I tried to reboot my computer from the harddisk grub said that it had an error 15 meaning i can't boot from my previously installed ubuntu or widnows.

I'm writing this using a Knoppix liveCD and can see that hda3 (/) and hda5 (/home) are now empty but fortunately my other partitions are still intact

Please can somebody tell me how to get the installer to work correctly?

TIA

Just my 2 cents: Probably, you should have noted the literal error message, and search the web for it (or file a bug report).

Anyways, the Live CD installer had a major(!) bug in one of the versions before yours, and it crashed many peoples' harddisks. That installer had been shortly introduced while Dapper had been in the beta phase already. So I'm not so sure if there aren't still minor bugs with that.

Ubuntu Dapper and its regular (install, not Live, CD) installer are already very stable since the earliest beta stage. I'd suggest to download and use the regular install CD instead of using the newly introduced Live installer.

Thanks - and good luck with Ubuntu though - it's a great distribution!

P.S.: If this is on a Ubuntu 5.10 computer, you also could do a distribution upgrade over the internet.

Well I wasn't aware that the LiveCD installer was unstable, the Ubuntu website said that 6.06 was stable enough for everybody to start using.

After reading Robbbert's reply I reinstalled Ubuntu 5.10 and performed the upgrade to Dapper as he suggested (also the way Ubuntu recommend you to upgrade). After 4 hours of downloading/installing this also failed!!! and completely wrecked the 5.10 system.

I can't say I'm very impressed with Ubuntu at the moment, both of the two main install/upgrade options failed and I was following the instructions to the letter. In the case of the upgrade, the 5.10 had only been installed less than an hour and so was completely clean and the upgrade still failed.

After reading a round I found that the text install option has been removed from the standard desktop cd (the new name for the liveCD) and is only available as the 'Alternate install' disc. I'm glad to say that using this went with out a hitch and I am writing this from Ubuntu 6.06. What's more I've got XGL working very flash

Thanks for the help Robbbert

Anyone else out there reading this and thinking of moving to Dapper I thoroughly recommend that you only use the 'alternate install' cd and NOT install through the liveCD and NOT by an online upgrade.

I did an online upgrade and it's still working perfectely fine. I can't wait till the official release is out, june 1st, they say. THen it's on to Edgy Eft in october!