Hi,
please could you help me I am total novice and i have googled and looked high and low for solutions to my first install, I am getting the following error at the beginning of installation of mandrake 9.2 first the GUI comes up then I press enter to get install under way, after it has checked usb then it stops and the error
" could not uncompress second stage ramdisk this is probably an hardware error while reading the data;(this may be caused by hardware failure or linux kernel bug)".
then I press OK and it says "error in exec of stage 2 :-( trying to execute `/usr/bin/runinstall2' from the installation volume the following fatal error occurred
fatal error in stage 1 exec format error
i cannot recover from this
you may reboot your system"...

I am at a total loss as what to do, I have tried as follows
I have checked the ISO with md5v, checked OK
I have check the memory I swapped it, was brand new anyway.
I have burned onto other media both cd-r and cd-rw both name brand at slowest speed.
my PC is all new hardware as follows.
mobo: PC Chips MB-825lMU SKT A KM266 DDR/SDR/ Integrated Savage 4/Sound/ LAN & USB 2.0 Motherboard
AMD DURON 1.6 266FSB CPU
Crucial 512 DDR266 PC2100 DIMM
Excelstor ESJ680G 80gb 7200rpm ATA100
LG 52x32x52x IDE DRIVE
I am very much a linux virgin, please excuse
Please help as i`m about to give up many thanks in advance.

I did a quick search on mandrake's hardware page and it looks like LG burners are not supported. I dont know if that would affect the reading portion or not though.

On the off chance you might try a text install instead of the GUI. Perhaps hit F1 and read instructions, if recall correctly.

Some LG burners at least are supported, I'm sure because I'm using one with mandy 9.2.
There is a known issue with some LG burners not having proper firmware and it causes them to stop working with mandy 9.2.
I'm not sure but I think it stops them from working all together.
You should check out your particular burner to see if its one of the ones affected before you continue with installing mandrake 9.2

I see from your post that you have tried severel things to solve the problem. I dont know for myself but I have seen some guru's suggest turning off 2.0 usb support in the bios and making sure there were no usb devices plugged in during the install.
I only mention this because you stated the install hangs at usb detection.
Just to be asking, have you selected "no plug and play operating system"
in the bios?

Many thanks for your help, I will try the sugestions you have made to turn off the usb 2.0 and also the plug and play in the bios,
I had made a note of that but had forgotten in the avalanche of information so far.
Also I have a another spare cd-rw drive about I will put that in the system to avoid possible conflicts. The text installation sounds good too I will give a go , thanks guys for all your help, theres enough to keep me busy over the next few nights, and not to give up

I have the exact same problem. I'm really getting irritated with Linux install problems. I've installed redhat 7.3 before and aside from video refresh rate problems everything worked fine and i was really happy with the distro.

Now all I'm trying to do is dual boot linux and win xp pro. I have a 160 gig hd that i partitioned with partition magic 8. I made all of the xp FAT 32, added a small /boot partition after the XP mbr and then put a 20 gig /root partition followed by a 800mb /swap at the end of the drive.

the first attempt was RH 8.0 installing from a DVD included in the RH 8.0 Complete reference book. Everything was moving along fine but when i get to the installing packages area. the system hangs, my HD and DVD drive lights flash in synch and it stays that way till i reboot. I've tried over and over and this is as far as i can get with that install.

So I decided to give Mandrake 9.2 a try, I burned the Iso for the first install disk and was planning on doing the linux askmethod to access the other two iso's from the HD. As soon as i get to the detecting USB and I get the same ramdisk error. I went back to my bios and disabled USB as well as PNP and made sure the ACAPI was also disabled. rebooted and tried again and I got the same error. I just happen to be the lucky owner of an LG cd burner, So my next move was remove the IDE cable for the LG drive and boot rom the dvd drive, Same error.


As much as I hate Windows I gotta admit I have never had an install problem with it. So any more suggestions. heres a rundown of my system. AMD athlon 850,FIC motherboard with VIA chipset, 768 mb's pc133 SDR, Nvidia gforce 2 card, LG 52X cd burner, Toshiba DVD rom, Seagate 160 gig HD, Win Xp Pro with SP1. USB port used only for webcam.