Hello,

I have a Pentoum 500Mhz, with three HD, a Quantum Fireball, a Fujitsu and a Maxtor. I have Win98 in the first one and I wanted to install Mandrake in the second or the third one.
I have the ISO image on my hard drive. The problem is that when I start the installation, after the GUI is loaded, a message comes up saying basically "could'not check for bad hard drives, input/output error".

What should I do? I tried the text installaiton, it didn't work.


Thanks, Penar

you need to burn that ISO image to a cdrom. linux will need to mount the cdrom and im not sure if it will do it off of a hard drive (since it will be expecting the iso9660 filesystem and it will get your windows FAT32).

i think this is your problem. ifyou can't use a cdrom burner then.........you're screwed. buy a packaged version or get a mate to burn the cd for you.

Alex

thanks, i will try that

where do you think is better to install it on the maxtor or the fujitsu. I have win98 on Quantum and I want to ahve them both. The maxtor is a Primary Slave, the Fujitsu is a Secondary drive.


thanks

p.s.: how long does an iso take to burn?

it really makes little difference but i think that you should install it one the drive which spins the fastest and which is the more feature rich. linux gets great speed boosts if you can turn on dma and all these other options. most new drives can.

if you install it to the primary slave it will be called hdb in linux and the other drive should be called hdc (your windows disk will be refered to as hda).

Just remember during install to install lilo or grub to the MBR (Master Boot Record) otherwise after the install linux won't boot.

you also should make a boot disk when it asks you. i never did then something went horribly wrong and I wished i had.

Alex

I got the CD, and started instaling Mandrake 8.1

In the first try it brought up the "cannot check for bad drive: input/output error". I removed mechanically the second hardrive, the Maxtor, and started installation again. It worked !!!!

After installing Linux on the third drive, a Fujitsu, i restarted and nothing booted, just a message came up: LI

after this i reinstalled linux, changing the features and I made sure that LILo was installed in the MBR. Same results !

I removed the fujitsu (I know that this was stupid) mechanically, and still win98 did not boot. I connected the fujitsu again, and now it doesn't detect the fujitsu.

Fortunately, using a win startup disk I accessed one of the hard drives, installed acronis (a boot manager), and now at least I can boot Win98.

Guys, please help this ignorant linux-aiming user !!! I don't want to give up.


Thanks !!!!
:smash:

penar

have you checked the jumper setting on the back of all your drives?

its best not to use cable select since distros have difficulty handling it.

this is the only thing that I can think of that would cause your problem. When the boot stops at LI it means (apparently) that the drive geometery is mismatched (or something along those lines). I have no idea what this means or how to fix it im afradi. try searching google for it (or these forums).

Alex

P.S. sorry

In the documentation for LILO there is a description of this problem... the LILO boot loader prints each of the characters: "L .. I.. L.. O" (LILO) at a different point in the processs of reading/parsing the partition table, loading the secondary boot loader code, locating and loading its maps... when the system stops at LI then it means that the booting process failed before it could reach the part of that sequence where it would have printed the second "L".
Usually this means that you have a mismatch in the way that LILO and the BIOS are trying to access specific parts of a drive... check your jumper settings of the drivers.. are they properly configured as masters and slaves?? is the setting in the CMSO setup about the HDD is correct..

I had a similar problem with mandrake 8.1 that would not boot
(stop at LI) and worked when i put the hard drive on another
motherboard.
The problem was that the hd was auto-detected by the bios.
When i configured the bios hd detection mannually it worked.
That may help you....