bad start to installing mandrake

[Calipso]

alrite, this is the very first time i tried installing linux and it went bad from the start.
im hoping to have a dual-boot, xp and mandrake 9.1.

i booted off the mandrake cd, it did all the hardware tests and such, and then all of a sudden i get this error message.

"Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk. This is probably a hardware error while reading the data. (This may be caused by a hardware failure or a linux kernel bug)"

then it just stops doing anything after i hit ok.

does this mean that my hardware isnt supported by mandrake?? or is this something else??
any help that i can get would be really appreciated.
thanx in advance :)

[questionasker]

sounds like a bad cd,
or cdrom read error.


are these bought cds, or d/l iso and burn?

[Calipso]

i got them online from almostfreelinux.com

i got a knoppix cd from them aswell and it worked fine

[questionasker]

ok, u bought them.

did you get them at same time?
and try both knoppix and mandrake at close to same time?

try knoppix again. if it works fine, then it must be a bad mandrake cd. if it doesnt, its probable your CDROM drive.

[Calipso]

well, i gave knoppix another shot.
and it didtn work.
i tried a couple of times and it always got an error while doing something with ramdisk again.
so now it looks like i might have a problem that i didnt think i had, time for a new burner probably.

thanx for your help/input

[Calipso]

whats weird though is that the night before, i installed xp on my new hdd and it worked fine.
itd be kinda strange if my burner just read windows cds and not the linux ones.
ill give it another shot, maybe download the iso's and burn new cds or something...but im definatelly not giving up on linux!

[mdwatts]

Try changing some of your bios settings to see if it helps. Power management is one to disable that may work.

[Calipso]

oh man,
i got home today from skool and thought id give it another shot...IT WORKED WITHOUT PROBLEMS!!!
so i have no idea what my computers problem was lastnight, maybe my burner is starting to fail on me, i dunno.
i did encounter a problem with booting up for the first time, but ill ask about that in a different thread

thanx for your input