Hi All

I have a Pentium 111 733 machine with 512MB Ram that I have done an Fdisk on so that it does not have another operating system on it. I am trying to install Mandrake 9.1 from 3 CDs I purchased with a Linux magazine. I can boot the machine to the garphic interface but when I hit enter to install I get a blank screen with two green flashing lights on the keyboard. If I hit F1 and then try and do a text install or type Linux vga=0 I get a kernel panic. I have looked this up and found this:

Error scenario: When using a file for your / (a "loopback"), booting your newly installed system will fail with a kernel panic with flashing keyboard lights.
Why: The initrd needs to load the loop.o module to mount your / partition, but recently loop.o depends on aes.o and because mkinitrd does not handle dependencies automatically, the change was not noticed and mkinitrd was not updated accordingly.
Solution: Format a floppy disk with a DOS filesystem (in Linux, you can use the command "mkdosfs /dev/fd0"). Copy patch.pl to the floppy disk. Remove the floppy and reboot using the Mandrake Linux 9.1 CD1 to do a CD-ROM installation. During boot, press F1 at the splash screen, then place your floppy disk that contains patch.pl in the floppy drive. At the prompt, type "patch", then follow the installation as usual.

I tried this but it does not work as the moment I hit the enter key after typing patch the PC starts running the install from the CD_Rom, it never even looks at the A drive to see if there is a patch there. Any ideas?

I really would like to give Linux a try.

Do you have a machine you can try the cds? I mean, just to boot and pass the moment it fails on your machine (it's safe, won't delete anything). It's the simpliest method to make sure it's not cd's fault. I'd check this before anything else.

Mara's got it right, in my experience the CDs I get from Mags can be pretty flaky (so far about 1 out of 3 end up being completely fubar when I try 'em).

I've seen this sometimes so here's a long shot...did the magasine you purchased include an md5sum of the CDs? If so, that would be a quick way to tell if they are ok.

If you find the CD is at fault, and you decide to try downloading them, make sure you md5 it to check it downloaded/burned ok.

Unfortunately that is not the problem, the discs are fine. A friend has used them and installed mandrake on his system without a problem. I have tested them on another PC at home and got right thru to the first selection parts of the install.

I created a boot disk using rawwrite and put the patch.pl file on the boot disk. I still got the same problem. It looks to me like the patch.pl is not being run even when I type patch in the commend line after hitting F1 at the first graphic screen. If it is being run then it is not fixing the problem because I still get a blank screen with two green flasing lights.

I installed Windows 98 on the PC and that installed fine. Tried to then install Mandrake and still got the same problem.

Could there be a problem in the Boot sector of my PC? And if so how would I repair it? Fdisk on the C Drive and then Formatting the C Drive does not seem to make any difference.

I also have two HDD on this PC, could that be causing a Problem?

thanks
Vasco, who is feeling like a real at the moment

Problem Solved

I removed a 128MB SDRAM chip and voila! away it went. It seems this type of error is usually a hardware error. Similar ones I have seen have been either the CD ROM or the RAM.

Thanks
Vasco

aw man...bad RAM will get ya everytime! Its always hard to pinpoint at the beginning...