Ok well when i first set up the system this was my set up:

abit ka7 mobo ata66
Amd athlon 700proc
20gb fujitsu hd ata66

and i used mandrake with the system.Everything was fine till the electicity went off and when i rebooted my hdd was F*()*ED
so i ordered a new drive:

maxtor 80 gb hd. ata133

well now im hooking up the system and it boot nicely adn the hdd is detected but now whe im trying to install mandrake this is the errors i get.

ERROR

Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk. This is probably an hardware error while reading the data. (this may be caused by a hardware failure or a Linux kernal bug)

then when i go look tat the kernel msg it says:

<6>end_request: I/O error,dev 16:40 (hdd), sector 1152128
<4>hdd: tray open


well i got type pissed and i sold my ram, and now im thinking of doing a 300 $ upgrade and i only have like 200. Now can you tell me the prob? if the hdd wokrs i can just buy new ram and a smaller hd or use this one and hook everything back up or just wait and get a 1.4+ ghz amd athlon with a mobo that supports ata133 and all the nice stuff.

Tray open? It seems like your system thinks hdd is some sort of CD.

hdd would be the Secondary Slave in your IDE chain; is that really where you installled Mandy? Post /etc/fstab, and the contents of your bootloader's config file. For lilo this would be /etc/lilo.conf, for grub it' /boot/grub/menu.lst (which is actually just a symlink to /boot/grub/grub.conf).

It looks like it's not your hard drive's fault... Hdd may be your cdrom as well. And it looks it is. Look at the installation cd. Maybe it's broken? Try to install from it on a different machine (just boot, not install).

The cd is fine because ive installed it on the laptop and the system before it and it works find.


Ive tried installing redhat and in the middle of the intstallation it stops when its opening some file .

SO it looks it's something between cdrom and hd. How do you have them connected? I mean cdrom looks like it's secondary slave. What's hd? Primary master, primary slave or secondary master?
I'd try to replug them: hd as primary master and cd as secondary master. I know you'll need two cables, but this method somethimes helps.

i had it as primary master. Well now i already sold my ram so i cant boot the system.

now i have two choises

1) wait about a month and get a 1.4 ghz system with ddr ram and all the goodies


2) get ram, a controller card, dvd drive and run the system now