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Live CD boots but installation hangs...
  • Maximus559Maximus559 December 2010
    I've got the Slitaz 3.0 standard live CD up and running on my old Dell Inspiron 3000 laptop. Specs are as follows:

    233 MHz Penium MMX
    208 MB RAM
    2.0 GB HDD

    Live CD boots and runs just fine. However, I'm having a hell of a time getting the OS to install. The first time I tried to install, the installer locked the system up almost immediately, during the "Creating mount point (/media/cdrom)..." phase. I tried running it again in text mode, and got these error messages along with an identical lockup:

    cmd 0x28 timed out
    hdc: DMA interrupt recovery
    hdc: lost interrupt

    Based on this connection to interrupts, I tried booting the live CD with the "irqpoll" option. This allowed the installer to progress past the first stage. However, this time it locked up during the main installation process, giving the following error:

    cp: read error: input/output error

    I rebooted and tried running the installer again. This time, it began spitting out errors during the installation progress (including the same old cp: read error), but did not lock up and "successfully" completed the installation. A reboot yielded the GRUB screen; however, the operating system failed to boot and simply looped back to the POST screen. On subsequent installation attempts, the installation process proceeded in exactly the same way (completed but with errors). However, the OS now begins booting but errors out with this:

    Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format

    I've never had this much trouble installing a distro before. DSL, which I had loaded on this computer previously, installed the first time with no problems. Everything I can find on the "cp: read" error relates it to bad CD-ROMs, but I assume that if my live CD was corrupted, it would simply fail to boot.

    So, I'm pretty well stumped. Any ideas?
  • Maximus559Maximus559 December 2010
    Never mind... I downloaded the ISA to ramdisk and used the "# mount -o loop slitaz-3.0.iso /media/cdrom" command as described here. All fixed! Installed and running like a champ.
  • Maximus559Maximus559 January 2011
    I think I may have figured out what the problem was here. Once I got SliTaz installed, I still wasn't able to get the CD-ROM drive to function correctly. However, since I didn't really need the CD-ROM drive anyway, I didn't look into it any further. Today, I ran into the issue again when I tried to play an audio CD. After running Google searches based on the errors messages revealed by dmesg, I found this post on the Ubuntu forums.

    Post # 8 suggests that memory configuration may have some effect on the ability of an operating system to communicate with the CD-ROM drive. To test this theory, I booted up the Damn Small Linux live CD and tried  to 1: mount a data CD and 2: play an audio CD. Both actions produced familiar errors where they had never done so before. The only change I had made to my system since successfully using the CD-ROM drive in DSL was to upgrade my memory from 112 MB (1x64 + 1x32 +16 integrated) to 208 MB (1x128 + 1x64 + 16 integrated). This is significantly above the system's rated maximum of 144 MB (2x64 + 16 integrated), so that might be causing problems. Or the RAM sticks I have now could just have some compatibility issues. Either way, it looks like my memory configuration is to blame.

    I can live with a CD-ROM drive on Linux, so, given the choice between more memory or CD-ROM support, I'll choose the memory any day. Just thought I'd report back in case anybody else runs into this problem in the future.
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