It shouldn't be this way! I am trying to upgrade my Mandrake 9.2 install to 10.1 and its taking over 4 hours. And as I recall when I initially installed Mandrake 9.2 on this machine last year it also took an inordinate amount of time for it to install off the CD.

About my setup: AMD K6-2 400Mhz processor, 128MB SDRAM, 40GB Maxtor HD, installing Mandrake off of a CD-RW\DVD combo drive (sorry I don't know what brand it is right now, and I can't really check since it is in the middle of the install right now...but it is about 4 years old).

I am tempted to think that the CD-ROM drive is at fault. Are certain makes and models known to have difficulty running the install process?

Definetly the CDROM. When you finally get Mandrake up and running put in any cd and do some tests on it.

$ hdparam -tT /dev/cdrom

post results. cdroms seem to break more frequently then other hardware. perhaps the lense is dusty or something. happens quite frequently to me.

the Timing buffered disk reads just dramitacally increase with each run.

IHMO your computer is too old for mandrake 10. you should add more ram's...

does the system run fast?

IHMO your computer is too old for mandrake 10. you should add more ram's...

i've installed rehat and mandrake on a pentium 2, 256 MB or 10 GB hard drive and it took about 45 minutes to install. he's 128 mb or ram wouldn't cause the install to take 4 hours. during the install process it's mostly just writting to disk. So there is definetly something wrong with his cdrom. although adding some more memory would definetly be a good idea.

Thanks for the prompt replies all. It probably is a dying CD-ROM drive that is causing the problems, maybe I will go out and buy a new one tomorrow.

lfx4linux: "IHMO your computer is too old for mandrake 10. you should add more ram's..."

I know it is an old, slow, and worthless computer...I put linux on this machine so that I could learn it and play around with it some. So as long as it boots up and runs (and it does) then I'm happy.

chbin: "Definetly the CDROM. When you finally get Mandrake up and running put in any cd and do some tests on it. $ hdparam -tT /dev/cdrom "

I open the command prompt window in Mandrake linux after it boots up and type in the command you suggested ("hdparam -tT /dev/cdrom") after the "[frugal@localhost frugal]$" and it says "command not found". Sorry I do not know linux command prompts very well so if there is a typo there I wouldn't recognize it.

You may have to run that command as root... and make sure you mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /cdrom before you run it... also as root

The command is hdparm (no second 'a')