Need Serious Help Installing

**le91688** · 01-26-2005, 03:06 PM

HEres my situation
I have Knoppix 3.6 and im putting it on a laptop
I have a Boot partition of 32mb a Swap of 300MB and a Root of 4GB
I run the install program, and i choose Debian install
It begins copying files and when its almost finished i get tons and tons of errors, about decompression or something and it says Cant read Block ###### 4345045bytes lost for example. Anyone have any idea what im doing wrong?

**WilyPython** · 01-26-2005, 03:49 PM

First confirm that the md5 checksums for the ISO file tally up, if that's okay, then it could be a bad burn - it happens.

**le91688** · 01-26-2005, 04:48 PM

could you please verify how to do a MD5 check

Also when i burnt the iso(using nero) it said, it may not fit on the disk unless i finalize it. Think that may have been what was messed up. The wierd thing is i can boot knoppix from the disk perfectly.

**WilyPython** · 01-26-2005, 05:44 PM

When you download the Knoppix ISO there is another file called . . . KNOPPIX_V3.7-2004-12-08-EN.iso.md5

Its just a checksum number which can be used to check for errors - always a risk with big files. Think of that Knoppix ISO file as being a giant binary number. All md5 does is perform a simple binary arithmatic opperation with it and the checksum number. Its not perfect, but it will catch most bad downloads.

The application you need to make use of that number is here . . .
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/%7Efloyd.../md5v12005.zip

It's only 474kb so there's no need to install it like other Windows applications, just unzip it to where ever you keep your downloads and their corresponding md5 files and run md5summer.exe

As for Nero, I think it may have been telling you that nothing else would fit on the disk. The Knoppix 3.7 ISO is 698Mb, not worth leaving it open for 2mb, or 10Mb at the most with overburn. I'm new to this myself, but I suspect using it as a demo disk wouldn't necessarily use all of the disk which is why the error could go unoticed, where as the installation it is more likely to.

I had to burn a second copy . . . because I got the german version first LoL

**le91688** · 01-26-2005, 10:07 PM

k well if i run checksum and there are no problems, what should i do?

**le91688** · 01-26-2005, 10:57 PM

Where should i install the boot loader? MBR or Partition?

**le91688** · 01-27-2005, 12:12 AM

I tried it again, i get to 94% and then i get READ ERROR at POS ####### in file /cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX over and over again....
This means i have a bad disk right? well how do i make a good one? Im using nero. SOMEONE PLEASE HELP

**Harry Kuhman** · 01-27-2005, 01:01 AM

Originally Posted by WilyPython

..... Its not perfect, but it will catch most bad downloads......)

It will catch all bad downloads. More specifically, the MD5 checksum is 32 hex bytes long. This means that there are 2"128 outcomes that you could get when you calculate an MD5 checksum, which is greater than 3.4e+38. For those who don't understand large numbers in scientific notation, this number is vastly much larger than the number of all files on all computers in the world. It is much much larger than all of the stars in the Universe (extimated to be in the magnitude of 5 x 10e22), and much much larger than the length of the entire universe in centimeters (3.8x10^28, based on a Universe with a 40 billion light year diameter). So suggesting that there could be bad downloads that is does not catch is rather misleading. You are simply not goting to get a different or corrupt file that has a matching md5 sum.

**Harry Kuhman** · 01-27-2005, 01:05 AM

Originally Posted by le91688

,,,, Im using nero. SOMEONE PLEASE HELP

Different version of Nero unfortunately hide the feature to burn an ISO in different places, so I can't say where it is in your Nero without knowing what Nero you are running. But it soulds like you have found the option to burn an ISO if you got this far. I would suggest burning a copy at 4x, not at a high speed. If that doesn't solve your problem, try the nodma cheat code.

**Harry Kuhman** · 01-27-2005, 01:07 AM

Originally Posted by le91688

Where should i install the boot loader? MBR or Partition?

If you are not using a boot manager program (like XOSL or Smart Boot Manager) thne you would need to install to the MBR. But I suggest and do myself install the Linux boot loader to the Linux partition and use one of the above boot managers to boot my systems; it prevents a lot of problems in the long run.