Hi, I have been trying distros for myself and my mum. I did several downloads, and burned ISO images, so I tried Debian Etch recently and Lenny. Fedora 9 and Ubuntu, Open Suse, but things went a bit wrong with DVD ISOs, Ubuntu Studio, GE Ubuntu, a retry of Lenny, including a more recent version, Oz Os, Mint Elyssa.

I tried Ubuntu Studio, with more than one burning. And Oz Os, sometimes they worked in part and sometimes not at all. And retried Lenny from an old disk was faulted, I tried more than one second hand hard drive, and three players, one CD, one DVD and one dual. Also the three burners, one with just two burns both were alright.

Debian etch faultily configured, but Lenny would not install GRUB or LILO. Open SUSE ran very slow.

Both computer magazine and my burns on DVDs never worked.

Can you help me diagnose, is it my burners, my players, my HDDs, my downloads, were my downloads disrupted by screen savers or other something else.

Might net install be better?

It maybe a hardware problem ,but with out knowing WHAT hardware you are trying to install on .I con not help
make and model of computer ?
Is it a laptop or desktop ?
is there a 3d graphics card or just a no board "3d integrated" chip set ?
What is the monitor ,tube ,or LED ,or plasma ?
is there another os like windows already on the hard drive ?
If so are you dual booting or replacing windows?

I have an old machine, large CRT monitor, 1.3 giga hertz chip, Nvidia 128 MB graphics card, Maxtor, SeaGate Medalist, Quantum Fireball and Western Digital hard drives. LG and Dell, Diamond Data, and write master CD and cd/dvd drives burners.

The Western Digital hard drive is new. One drive is ATA I am not sure if I have any SATA.

My network card is realtek.

No dual boots.

Cable connection.

Some install errors were problems changing a partition and loading LILO... so to me it looks like a damamged hard drive.

Depending on the card .If it is older than a Gforce 4 and maybe a gforce 5 .Fedora 9 WILL NOT INSTALL using the gui .It will only install in TEXT mode . The legacy nvidia cards are not supported by fedora 9 .For a fix with fedora 9
SEE: "Nvidia Videocard Setup In Fedora Linux"
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/forum/...d.php?t=188241
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I am surprised that "mint" did not install
are all 4 of the hard drives installed in a raid setup ( software raid - MS windows only)
or are some of them on a usb connection .
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If there is no problem burning the iso's into a bootable disk ,I don't think that is the issue .
give this a try
make sure there is only 1 drive installed ( or two 1 master and the second is slave) .
run "SystemRescueCd"
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
after you burn it to cd ( not dvd)
the disk has " gparted" on it ,use that to format the drives to ext3
and try reinstalling the different distros .

I tried Mint on my Dell and with one of the hard drives, it worked, it gives the impression there is damage on a drive.

I bought an IDE/SATA DVD/CD Writer. I will try.

The idea of using the rescue disk is good, I actually already have it! Thanks.