Drive Error Messages, What's Cause?
 

Hello, All --

As a long time Windows user, I decided to finally give the other guys a chance and scheduled this weekend to get a Linux box up and running.

After some poking around, I decided to get the Red Hat 9 ISOs and burn them myself. I did it with Easy CD Creator on an old Win NT 4 machine (following the instructions at linuxiso.org I found, sorry but can't post exact URL yet apparently), and it seemed like all went OK.

I was very thrilled when I inserted CD1 in the target machine and it booted from CD to give me the menu. The first thing I tried was "linux mediacheck". It got all the way through to "running /sbin/loader" and then seemed stuck forever.

The CD-ROM was doing a lot of activity, though, so I switched the console views around to see what was going on. On console 3 the last mesage is:

* mntloop loop0 on /mnt/runtime as /mnt/source/RedHat/base/stage2.img fd is 8

(As an aside, this machine has no floppy drive, and I've configured the BIOS to reflect this.)

On console 4, there are a lot of messages that look like CD-ROM read problems, such as:

<4>hdc: cdrom_decode_status: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
<4>hdc: cdrom_decode_status: error=0x30LastFailedSense 0x03
<4>hdc: ATAPI reset complete
<4>end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 1157512

(repeat with different sectors a lot of times)

Occasionally there are some odd ones like:

isofs_read_super: bread failed, dev=07:00, iso_blknum=16, block=32

and eventually

<3>cramfs: wrong magic

at which point I have a language choice option for the install on console 1 and console 3 says:

* failed to mount loop: Invalid argument


In your considered opinion, which of the following is most likely true:

1) Newbie failed to burn CD correctly, perhaps because he used a 650MB disc instead of a 700MB disc (guess due to high sector numbers failing)

2) Newbie failed to burn CD correctly, perhaps because he used 4x recording speed and got some buffer underruns (wild guess)

3) CD-ROM Drive is not working properly (don't think so, as will work OK with a Windows installation CD)

4) CD-ROM Drive is not working with Linux properly (don't think so, since it seems OK up to a certain point)

Any help is appreciated.

-- Otis

I'd vote for 1 or 2, possibly also 5:

Newbie failed to burn CD correctly perhaps because he did not check the md5 sum of the ISO files and the download itself was corrupt.

The long and the short of it is that if the media check fails, then your media isn't good. That is, after all, the whole point of the media check :) . Check the md5 sum of the ISOs you already have, if they match, then reburn the CDs;
if they don't redownload, check again, then reburn the CDs when the MD5 dums do match.

Hope this helps.

md5 OK
 

I did do the MD5 check, and the three ISOs passed, so I don't think that's it.

I just discovered that the CD is readable on Windows machines (something I didn't expect). However, I also have trouble accessing some files on the Windows machines, so it looks like the CD is the culprit one way or the other. I'll just have to try again.

One quick question: Am I missing 3 CDs? There were three other ISO images in there (all with SPRMS in the name), but I didn't grab them. Should I have?

-- Otis

Naaah, those are the Source RPMs. Required by licence (GPL software sources must be readily available, that's pretty much the whole licence), but not for install.

Thanks!
 

Well, my newly burned CD-ROM seems to be working. At least it passed the media check, although I did see some more odd error messages on console 4. They can't be too serious if the test didn't fail.

I guess all will be revealed in time. Thanks for your help!

-- Otis