Yesterday i downloaded the 3 images of Mandrake 10 Community which i burned and was going to install today.
I boot my pc with the first cd in the cdrom drive, i get the mandrake setup screen, everything goes fine.
As a linux noob i manage to get through the first setup screens. Untill i get to the hard disk partitioning.
Before i rebooted i created 2 partitions in partition magic which you can see on the screenshot:

apperently i can not post a screenshot because i do not have 5 posts

Anyway i created a Swap partition of 512Mb, an other one in ext2 of 58Gb (root)

So i choose the partition from the list and then it gets to formating.
This is where it goes wrong. Sometimes the pc freezes during the formating, and sometimes it freezes while installing mandrake!

I dont know what is causing this problem!!

(ps . Also my Logitech MX500 on USB does not funtion under Mandrake setup )

I installed red hat 9 without any problems, but i want mandrake!:

First of all, you should use either reiserfs or ext3 for your root partition. ext2 is an out-dated filesystem (it's not journalized). Second, I am using a Logitech MX500 with my Mandrake 9.2 system at this very moment. I didn't have to do any tweaking for it to work (and all 7 buttons work). What did you choose during the mouse setup? As for the installer getting stuck halfway through, I don't really know what to say based on your description. It shouldn't happen, unless, of course, if you have very little RAM. Do you get any error messages?

I tried ext3, same problem.
I didn't do anything with my MX500, id just wont work (unless i plugin an old ps/2 mouse , run the setup and plug it out then i can use my mx500).
I have 256MB DDr ram. No error messages were given, the entire pc freezes , so i have to reboot.
In the afternoon i will try running the setup and viewing the logs.

ok, i ran he setup again after repartitioning the drive to ext3.
I plugged my mx500 in Ps/2 and now it works fine.
So i got on to installing, changed view to logs and let it run again, till i freezed.

The last 2 entries were:

*opened rpmdb for writing in /mnt
*opened rpm database for transaction of 13 new packages, still 250 after that to go.

Does a bad iso could be the problem to this ?
I shall try rewriting it.

2nd retry with logs and freshly burned iso. same result but at a different time.
Heck i guve up, i guess its redhatr after all

Recent installation programs may require ext3 or reiser for root and/or boot partitions. Also, why not use the partitioner that is part of the installation program? Don't create partitions beforehand, let the installer do it.

There is a problem with installing that may exist with 10.0. I found it playing with 9.1 or 9.2. That is, if you have another version such as 8.2 already installed, the installer for 9.2 (?) will create new partitions in empty space on a disk, set them as mount points for 9.2, and then OVERWRITE THE EXISTING INSTALLATION instead of using the newly specified partitions. The installer should NOT do that.

When you made install disks, which files did you put on each disk? I have the entire program downloaded, but can't get the installation started.


Thanks,

I bought v. 9.2 download edition CDs from Linuxcentral.com and just let the bootable CD's program do its thing. Ditto for a 9.1 Powerpack from Mandrake, etc. I don't select programs to put on a disk. I thought the ISO images would have the file layout including programs pre-specified. It sounds like you are not working with ISO images. I wouldn't know how to do that. The hdlist.cz file that has the file layout for the disk and maybe dependency information would have to be conformed to by hand, by you, if you are not working with ISO images. Doing it by hand sounds hard and unreliable.

Exactly the same as Beire . . .

And after it freezed while formatting, It trashed the MBR so badly that:

1 - I'm unable to format any ntfs partition nor install XP.
2 - The HD diagnostics suite (seatools) gets stuck too, reporting bad sectors from sector 0 on . . .
3 - Even if I wiped the entire disk (linux partitions included) XP ran first step of setup fine, but couldn't boot from the HD. Sounds like a simple MBR glitch, right? then . . .)
4 - Did recovery procedure from the XP Cd: fixboot/fixmbr - > nothing

Oddly enough, on the same system and HD, and after all this, i can wipe the disk an install correctly with Mandrake 9.1 community, without a glitch.

Then I tried (today, 2 a.m., quite tired) to install Win millenium (9X). The first attempt to partition and format a FAT32 one failed, win setup shooting that it was unable to format the partition, and it took forever to format, BTW. My second attempt (left running overnight) succeeded, and the system now boots millenium fine. Still i'm at a loss as to why millenium took so long to format the FAT32 part and XP just couldn't, while Mandrake 9.1 formatted it's / (ext3) and swap parts in a fingersnap.

After all, if it was a defective HDD, i shouldn't be able to even install Mandrake 9.1 . . . and I did, before and after all this.

Now that I recall, the disc drives (DVD, CDR) have been acting strange too. Again, if it was a hardware issue, why am I able to install Mandrake 9.1 sans a hiccup?

What Mdk10.0 could possibly do to a HDD beyond writing part tables and formatting??

Beire, do you by *chance* have my combination of NForce2 mobo with 80 gigs seagate barracuda ata 7200?

I have the nforce2 chipset but i do not have a seagate barracuda, but a WD 120GB.
Anyway the problem evolved and now i cant even get into the setup(it freezes on the point where it checks the serial ports)

......could be a motherboard problem. I had a problem like that the year before last with an AOpen motherboard and windows XP. The power went out in the house for 5 minutes and the coomputer in questions did not have a UPS (but it did have a surge protector.

2 days later, I was having ramdom freezes in widnwos XP. and the next thing was that windows XP would refuse to come up. formatting the drives did not help (I had 2 60 gig IBM desktars). I tryied every possible combination and the results were the same: the installation did not finshed or worst it finished but the machine would come up with errors.

Somehow the motherboard could not take the power outage and it messed the 2 drives too. The interestign thing is that the memory (2 x 256 sticks) and the CPU were fine. I replaced the motherboard with an ASUS board and both drives with 80 gig western digital ones.

Having said that certain posibilities come to my mind here....if you were able to install millenium maybe not everything is lost, inthe sense that what we are dealing here could be a corrupted mbr due to improper settings in the bios for that particular drive. See if the drvie manufacturer offers a diagnostic tool for that drive. Usually those tools come in the form a bootalbe floppy. Then you could use it to diagnose the disc, and correct any problems, and then try again.

Also what you can do (if you have a spare drive) is to boot the machine with another hardrive and see if the problem happens again with a different drive. If that is the case, then the mobo has an issue....otherwise the drive would be the problem here...

let us know of it goes....

Hello!!
im new at this forum.
im having the same problem that you, and the only thing that i've found is that there is problems with the NFORCE2 chipset. so, my friend, im afraid that we have to re-compile the kernel, setting off one option that i will post soon if i do it. the way to do it is installing mandrake with minimal options, and then install the packages manually. (dont know how to do this, im noob)

i've read that we can install the mandrake with the 2.4 kernel option, but it hangs too.
so, i dont know what to do.
this is not a HDD problem. My pc works fine, its brand new, and i used it for several months with windows XP and no hangs.

yesterday i tried to install mandrake, and had the problems that you said.
i also crashed my windows XP installation because of the MBR and the partitions,altough i have 2 HDD and didnt modified the partition table of the windows XP hard disk. Fixboot and fixmbr didnt resolve anything.
there is another command: bootcfg
try it if you want, but i couldnt do anything neither.

sorry about my english, im from Argentina.
if i have some news, i will write here.

if my linux installation was ruined in a way and i formatted my linux partitions i couldn't acces my windows either.
What i do then (not the best solution but it works) is insert the winXP cd and start a new xp installation, after the copying of setup files(the last dark blue/yellow screen) i restart my pc and the windows bootloader pops up and i'm able to choose my old windowsXP installation.
I dont know if that solves your xp crash.

Anyway if there is a problem with the Nforce2 chipset , why do i seem to be the only one with this problem. I searched a lot on google and didn't find any solution.
I'm downloading slackware now. Don't know is this will work( i doubt it in a way), i hope so.

Good luck, and let me know if you got a solution.

i've found lot of people with the nforce2 problem. now im not at home, but lot of people told me to boot the mandrake cd, press f1 and type
"linux noapic nolapic"
try that, i hope that this will solve our problem.

i dont know what those commands mean, but i managed to install mandrake 9.2 without any flaws.
At least that's what i thought.
It takes me 2(sometimes more) reboots untill i get into X. Random freezes at startup.
This in mandrake, red hat, ...
I thought it could be my new hard drive, but also my motherboard is new, so i just don't know.
If you let me know what those commands stand for i will try them.
Thanks! I hope they work