When I'm installing Mandrake Linux 8.1 it always freezes when its installing it always froze when I'm installing Windows ME to.........Could my hard drive be bad? I'm not sure, If someone could help me out that would be awesome.:smash:

maybe not necessarily a hard drive problem but definitely a hardware problem.

During the Mandrake installation, the default hard drive format is for it to format it quickly and not check for bad clusters. It'll ask you if you want to do a low level format... this will take a while depending on home big the disk is, but if you choose that it should return bad clustering information if there is any. Also, you may want to try a text-based install, which has a slightly better chance of not screwing up.

Also, if your machine is newer and the drives or either jumpered for CS, cable select, or just jumpered funky; like set for master with a slave when there is no slave... this can sometimes give the kernel a hiccup during installation that leads to a freeze, and it did the same thing to the DOS based Windozies.

Also... it could just be a deranged CDROM, but admitedly if its hardware dying the HD is more likely.

G'luck

Finegan

Well I finally was able to scan my hard drive it didn't come back with any bad cluster or anything....So I'm not sure what it is I also tried to use the text based installation and it still freezes I'm not to sure whats messing it up but I still get the....Kernel panic: context corrupt warning.....

change your memory chip !!! my installation kept on crashing and hanging today, so i swapped the memory chip from 128mb ram to a differnet chip (64mb ram) and all is working ok now, memory can give you the strangest problems, try it and let me know what happens

have fun
Richie