Installation goes nuts at 87%...

[Seeker]

Up until about a day or two ago I had never used linux, so I'm still pretty new at this stuff. That being said, I'm pretty baffled as to what I should do in this situation and you folks seem knowledgeable in this field.

some specs:

700Mhz
320 Megs of Ram
roughly 30 gigs of hd space

I have 3 partitions: hda1 is NTFS with XP installed on it.
(Roughly 20 gigs)

hda2 is ext3 with... some of knoppix on it.
(Roughly 8 gigs)

hda3 is linux swap.
(Roughly 1 gig).

Every time I try to install either ext2 or ext3 it goes insane with errors at some point past 50%. I'm not sure with ext2 because I've only tried installing with it a couple times, but I've probably tried ext3 like 6 times and it always screws up at about 87%.

I can't remember the errors exactly, but I remember seeing some input/output errors and some stuff about sectors. It goes on with this shit for a while, then suddenly it shows 90% in the middle of all the mess and continues on with the installation.

At first I thought it might be a hardware issue (which pissed me off cause I just got this harddrive) because the 'thinking' sounds the computer makes change when it starts to get screwy. It sounds almost like a quite floppy drive.

But then, I tried installing Reifer (or whatever it is), and with only 1 error it installed. But then, it was a little gimpy:

When I first rebooted, it did its thing until the kmd came up, at which point it asked me for information and all that. Then it tried to finish booting, kept making that aforementioned 'thinking' sound, and pretty much hung up, so I just turned my comp off. When I rebooted, it sort of picked up where it left off. It took a while, but it booted into a useable kmd environment. I rebooted again after messing with the window appearances a bit, and it booted up considerably faster (though it still took about 5x as long at the splash screen as it does with the live-cd).


So, my point, I guess, would be... can anyone help me? I really want to use ext3.

[MattT]

It could be your CD. Try knoppix testcd at the boot prompt. I hope it is not you hard drive. I have never heard of anyone having ext3 or ext2 problems with Knoppix before.

[Seeker]

Yup, tried the testcd thing... at the end it said 'everything looks OK'.

Sigh. Damn computer.

[Dave_Bechtel]

--As root, run ' badblocks -c 64 -s -v /dev/hda2 '. I bet your HD has bad sectors.

--If you do the "poor man's install" (copy x:\knoppix\knoppix to c:\knoppix\knoppix) and boot from floppy; if it makes the same grinding noises during the install, you have bad sectors on hda2.

--In any case, you don't want to be running an unstable system! If there's any doubt, back up, wipe the HD (' dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1M ') - BIG FAT WARNING - THIS WILL WIPE ALL DATA ON THE HD! Run from CD and back up 1st! and take it back for a replacement under warranty.

--And if you're not running a HD cooling fan, get one. They can be had for under $10.

Tip: do ' dpkg -l |grep backup ' - I found "cdbackup" and "mondo" on my sys.

Yup, tried the testcd thing... at the end it said 'everything looks OK'.

Sigh. Damn computer.

[Seeker]

Hmm... thanks for the instructions, I'll give it a try in a lil while.

[Seeker]

Hmm, tried that thing you posted, but it gave me this '1m: invalid numer' crap, or something like that... so instead I tried deleting every partition and installing knoppix on the new hda1... and it worked perfectly except for one thing: at about.. like, 93 or 95% it had some sort of IRQ7 error.

But it didn't seem to affect anything.. I'm running it from the hd right now and everything loads perfectly, even faster than when I boot from the cd. No problems yet.

[Dave_Bechtel]

...you have to capitalize the M.

--And you should still run badblocks on /dev/hda, I wouldn't trust that HD too far if I was you.

Hmm, tried that thing you posted, but it gave me this '1m: invalid numer' crap, or something like that... so instead I tried deleting every partition and installing knoppix on the new hda1... and it worked perfectly except for one thing: at about.. like, 93 or 95% it had some sort of IRQ7 error.

But it didn't seem to affect anything.. I'm running it from the hd right now and everything loads perfectly, even faster than when I boot from the cd. No problems yet.