I'm trying to help a friend install sarge onto his machine, but when it gets to the part that says "scanning disks" it froze at 42% (we tried it twice. 42% both times). I have no idea what's wrong. I used the same exact CD to install sarge on my machine and it was fine. And we can run Knoppix perfectly on his machine. Does anyone have any clue what's wrong?? I don't know if its a hardware issue, but I can't imagine any hardware he could have that would cause it to fail...

Since the error is reproducible, this sounds like a bug. The Sarge installer is still in beta stage, after all. If you're using an older version of the installer, you should try beta4 (or perhaps even the latest daily build).

Also, you don't say if the failure happened while booting with the "linux26" command or without it. Try different boot options before giving up.

You should try typing "expert" at the boot prompt. It is true that it is probably a bug, but the expert mode gives you more options and takes you step by step through the installation. You may be able to see exactly where it is freezing and possibly work around it.

Thanks guys, we installed it with the linux26 option and it worked. The installation was successful, but unbelievably when we tried to boot up the system it froze. And I'm not talking about freezing when booting the operating system, the damn thing froze in the freaking BIOS! We can't access the BIOS options, the boot menu, or anything. Grub doesn't even load, it just sits there with the Gateway boot screen and does absolutely nothing.

Does anyone have ANY clue as to what happened here? The only explanation I can think of is a coincidental hardware failure with the BIOS/ROM chips on the computer, but there shouldn't be any way that the Debian installer could corrupt that part of the system, could there? Thanks for any advice, we're pretty desperate now.

Well the install should not have done that what kind of hardware do you have in the machine? You may want to take and remove the battery from the motherboard or set the jumper to clear the CMOS so you can back to the defaults.

I'm not sure, its a Gateway machine and its my friends. It was running Fedora Core perfectly fine before we tried to install Debian again though. Thanks for the tip, I will try to reset his jumpers (hopefully he didn't throw away the manual...) and see what happens

are you sure that it is crashing at the bios screen? it could be that the grub installation went awry. try to boot off a cd. if you can do that, then grub is messed up. you need a debian boot floppy to fix it.

Nope, we already tried to boot from the CD and it didn't work. Like I said when the Gateway boot-screen pops up we can't even go into the BIOS setup menu, its completely frozen.

yeah, software can't mess up the bios (well, a very malicious virus could, but gnu/linux never touches the bios). i'd say that it had to be a coincidental failure. make sure all of your cables/power are connected tightly. get out your motherboard manual and figure out which jumper to short to clear and reset the CMOS/BIOS.