Linux-Mandrake

[Jock203]

I ordered Linux-mandrake 7.2 from 'The Linux Emporium' and it arrived today.

I ran scan-disk and all that on my drives and read the installation manual on the CD. I boot'ed Mandrake from the CD and waited for the linux screen to appear.

When it did I got a load of loadin gobble'de'**** and then it crashed. It keeps doing this and won't let me install.

Has anyone else had this problem? or know how to fix it? It could be a dodgy cd because I bought it from the 'cheap cd' section.

Thanks for any help.

[Gwil Da Skank Of TA]

Hm :(
Have you tried making a boot floppy for Mandrake in Windows and done it from that? The CD has a little utitilty on for creating it :)

I had to do that cos booting straight from Cd for install didnt work, so I made the boot floppy and it worked :)

If that dont work.....Errr......might be a dodgy CD..

[aef]

Just to check - did you boot from the CD or start from Windows/DOS (only you said 'loadin' and I'm not sure whether you meant 'loading' or 'loadlin').

It might be useful if you could reproduce the gobbledegook in question - it would help to identify where it went wrong.

Making a boot floppy and working for there may help, depending on what the problem is. You may also have the option of booting from DOS with loadlin, but neither of these will help if there is some incompatibility between the supplied kernel and your system. Have you successfully booted Linux on that box before?

AEF

[Jock203]

I meant 'loading' sorry for the confusion.

As for reproducing the gobble'de'**** there's too much to copy. But I can describe it.

On the screen there's a pengiun at the top with 'Welcome to linux'. Then underneath there is alot of details about virtual references and 'call trace' and 'stacks'. Detecing my cd-roms and hard-drives and things like that.

One thing I did notice was a message saying:
'Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000014'

Me thinks that might have somethin to do with my pronlem. It still continues to load tho but crashes after a 'call trace'.

I've tried to boot both from the cd and from a floppy disk. I'm going to contact the place I got it from and ask for a replacement.

Thanks for anymore help tho.

[Godin]

have you tried any other linux distributions on your computer? this sounds like a problem in the memory handling to me, and this sort of thing changes between releases and distros (unless its somethign fundamentally wrong with the kernel (in which case it shouldnt have been released))

[Jock203]

nope i've never tried another distribution.