I'm trying to install Mandrake using an HP Cd-Writer 8200i. The Cd Rom boots fine, but as soon as it strats to load, "Cannot run ..../runinstall, Cannot recover from this you may reboot your PC". It Gives me the same error out of a MT DVD-Rom drive, in the same machine. But no such error on a sony Cd Drive on another machine . Any ideas why???? I've tried with 3 different Cd's for Mandrake 9.2 and 10. and the same thing happens, i know they work beacuse they were all previously used to install Mandrake on other PC's without any problems. The machine has no more cd drives to be used, so i'm thinking of aqcuiring a normal CD-rom drive soley for the installation, but am still wondering why they dont work.

Any input is greatly appreciated.

BTW, the config on the target machine is:

Pentium 4, 2.0GHz
512 Mb Ram
40GB Hard Drive (With Windows XP installed)
20GB Hard Drive (where linux is to be installed)
HP CD-Writer 8200i
MT Dvd-Rom drive

Thnx again for any input.

thundercracker; take a look at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX section4.3.5 cdrom/dvd rom drives along with section 5 Single list of HOWTOs and section 6 Single list of mini-Howtos please expand each section including last two for detailed information. the last two scroll till u find the cd,s believe there is several notations of cd,s

I appreciate the reply Penguin4, but you went on another direction, totally. I'm trying to install Linux, not the drives. When i run the installation it ends with the runinstall2 error. I've seen several posts about it, but still cant find a solution.

Any other help, is appreciated

Thanx.

thundercracker; answers may be on the other machines u mentioned. check
the configs on them then try to emulate or mirror them to u r machine having problem. are those other machine identical in hardwareconfig and config same? with comparison if config same do they start to work if not then there is some misconfig recheck and redo.

thundercracker,

the same thing happened to me with an old TDK VeloCD. I used to have to use a spare cdrom drive that I scavenged from work to do the install. After I got the install to complete I could put the TDK in and run normally. The problem was the hardware recognition in the Mandrake install from 6.2 to 8.2. It actually started working again in 9.0.

If you get far enough in the install (I couldn't with the TDK) you might be able to hit F1 and then type alt1 to boot the 2.4 kernel and see if that works. (This is if you're installing 10.0)

Another alternative would be to see if HP has any firmware upgrades for your drive.

If neither of the above works, your original idea of trying another drive would be the way to go. I had to do it for a few years myself.

Yeah, I tried another dirve, I found, and it worked, i restored the orignal driv es after insatlling as you said and yes they were usable. thanx all, for your help. I'm still wondering as to why those particular drives dont seem to cooperate with the installation.

BTW,
the other machine with the Sony cd rom, has the vey same specs as the one with the HP CD-Writer. wich baffles me even more.

Well thanx again.

thundercracker & doug_s; not that i,m a guru (far from that) just an assumption, some thing to do with the interface between hd & os or bios.
hope am wrong.