I had downloaded Mandrake 10.1 official and I checked MD5 for it and it was fine.

I burned the images to 3 CDs (with writing spedd 8X), and I tested by installing on many PCs, and It was fine, no complain.

Recently I tried to install it on my laptop latitude Dell D600, but it gave me this erro message:

" Fatal Error finishing initialization ".

I thought the problem with my new laptop (because I had already installed software before no many PCs), then I tried to install it on my Desktop, the same error message came on!!!

Is there any limitation for using or installing Manadrake 10.1 ?

Note: Trere is hardly any scratch on CDs

There's no limit. Certain cd drives don't like certain types of media which might explain it or one of your disks got damaged in some way.

download the 10.2 version you might find the problem has been resolved.

This serves 2 purposes, it checks that there was not a burn fault which is not apparent, as I have found before and secondly,
takes into account added drivers for hardware.

It is a good idea also if you can burn the iso's on the disc you want to use as boot, so you might have to resort to another
operating system to do this. I have sometimes found Suse works on some machines where Mandrake doesn't and visa versa.

I also found that Suse was better with laptops for a long while but since 10.1 mandrake many laptop problems have been sorted.
You could try suse if it works, then burn the latest mandrake -provided that you have only a 32 bit machine.
.

I refer you to
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=332653

Do I understand you have this issue with both mandrake and fedora core?

Both, I repeat *both*, of kilgoretrout's suggestions are possible. (twice in one day we have possible CD/drive conflicts! -- if 'wrong' CDmedia, try different brand with different media-side color.)

lol

I downloaded the image again and burned on a brand new CDs.

I checked the MD5, it was fine.

When I booted the laptop from CD1, and after while it gave this erro message:

"Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk. This is probaly an hardware error while reading the data .( This may be caused by a hardware failure or a linng kernel bug) ".

What does that mean ?

Again, this *can* mean any of the previous things, *but*, with this specific new symptom, I am beginning to suspect either the CD-drive's write-laser is failing, or *Much* more probably, you have the afore-mentioned drive/media problem. I said I suspect!. 'Borrow' a different-brand, different-color blank or three from a friend, maybe swap with them so they can try your current brand for cheap.

What brand & model is your drive, ditto your blanks?

(There is actually only _one_ laser, with several operating power-levels; they usually fail first at write-power; thus also, how old is your drive, how many writes has it done, and roughly!, how much time does it have reading?)

lol,