[wplug] Fatal Error During Installation! Any Ideas?

[harrold at sage.che.pitt.edu]

hey.

it sounds like your hardware is dieing.  as suggested by others, it could
be the harddrive or the ram. have you expirenced any power surges, power
outages lately? 


Sometime in September J Aaron Farr assaulted keyboard and produced...

|Okay, straight to the point:  While installing Mandrake 8.0 I got the 
|following error:
|
|SEGMENTAION FAULT: SEEMS LIKE MEMORY IS MISSING AS THE INSTALL CRASHES
|
|Any suggestions as to what to do from here?
|
|Here's the long version of the story:
|
|I started have serious problems with one of my personal computers that was 
|set up with a dual boot Win98/Mandrake 8.0. It started with Win98 having 
|fatal errors (corrupted or missing system files, or sometimes reporting a 
|corrupted registry), so I reinstalled Win98.  Windows overwrote my boot 
|record, so I lost the ability to boot my Linux system.  Well, Win98 
|continued to have problems from time to time, and eventually, simply 
|wouldn't boot.  It'd report a corrupted registry, say it had fixed it with a 
|backup and then restart, only to do the whole thing over again.  I had all 
|my personal Linux files backed up (but not my windows files), and I had just 
|gotten new copies of Red Hat 7.1 and the latest stable Debian distro, so I 
|thought, what the heck, I'll just install over Mandrake and try out the new 
|distros and then I can mount one of my windows partitions and at least save 
|my windows data.  Well, neither of the distros would install properly, both 
|would hang or crash at some point.  So I thought to try to reinstall 
|Mandrake 8.0.  That's when I finally got the above error.  So currently my 
|system has Win98 on it that won't boot, and it's partitioned and formated 
|for a Linux system too.  What can I do (other than booting to DOS and saving 
|my windows files to floppy) to save my data and get a working operating 
|system again?
|

what can you do?
can you boot linux off a floppy bring up the network and move your files
that way? if it has a burner you might also be able to boot off a boot
disk and burn the win98 stuff that way. you could try removing the
harddrive and sticking it in another compuer.

i would try the memtest, and any diagnostics provided by your harddrive
manufacturer. what part of the install does it hang on? have you tried to
run a text only install?

-- 
john
kitten the other white meat.