Hi

I've been trying to install Mandrake linux on an old machine, but to no avail.

The installation runs fine until the partition creation process; at that point, it usually hangs, with the keyboard led's flashing.

The error I get is "ext2 formatting of hda failed".

I've tried this with 2 different hard disks, both of which seem error free when accessed via my other machine and through dos. I also tried a redhat cd but again, there was a error with partitioning.

Looking at the kernel messages, I noticed another message, "bad magic number on disk hda /url/bin/perl-install..."

The pc is a PII 233 with 192ram.

Any advice would be appreciated

have you scan for bad block a.k.a bad sector on you harddisk?

i suspect that you have a badsector which is physical damage on the surface of you harddisk