format for Ubuntu

[stripe]

hello all,
I installed ubuntu as a dual boot os on my main computer. It installed to a disk that was ntfs (IDE), and my main xp was on a SATA drive. (I think it installed grub by default, but idk)
I liked it so much that I erased the HD on my secondary computer (still ntfs) and am currently trying to install ubuntu as the only os on this computer...
Using the same install cd, I can not get ubuntu to install itself.
Here is what I am trying:
bios set to boot first from CD, then HD
at startup, the Ubuntu splash screen comes up with the options, I choose 'install', then I get:
(initramfs) [91.0908112] buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 178898
this repeated multiple times with different beginning numbers.

this install in on:
Dell Dimension 2350, celeron 1.7, 2 GB ram,

my guess is that HD needs to be formatted correctly, does ubuntu install not do that?

Thanks in advance

[deathadder]

It's not a problem with the filesystem the drive is formatted with, and yes your right Ubuntu will format the drive for you. The problem is that your drive can't read an area off the disc so it's getting errors when storing that information in a buffer.

9/10 times that I've ran into this I've "fixed" the problem by writing a new disc out at a lower speed. I know you've already used the disc for installing on another machine but it's probably the easiest option to try. Try burning the disc at something low like 4x, although I generally find 1, or 2, times slower is fine. For example if your drive writes a 4,8,16,32 and 64x then writing the disc at 16 or 32 works. Well, in my experience anyway.

[stumbles]

It's not a problem with the filesystem the drive is formatted with, and yes your right Ubuntu will format the drive for you. The problem is that your drive can't read an area off the disc so it's getting errors when storing that information in a buffer.

9/10 times that I've ran into this I've "fixed" the problem by writing a new disc out at a lower speed. I know you've already used the disc for installing on another machine but it's probably the easiest option to try. Try burning the disc at something low like 4x, although I generally find 1, or 2, times slower is fine. For example if your drive writes a 4,8,16,32 and 64x then writing the disc at 16 or 32 works. Well, in my experience anyway.

deathadder, that has been my experience as well. Whatever the max write speed of a dvd/cdrom drive is, if I pick a number half that for writing usually works best for me.

[mrrangerman43]

Same here, when ever I burn a .iso image I burn at a slow speed, fact is I burn at 4 and have not had a problem yet.

[saikee]

I am forced to burn CD and DVD at low speeds as I have switched to rewriteable discs so that I could burn a new version over the old distro.

The integrity of the disc can be checked against the MD5 number.

If the disc is good then the installer could mismatches the video or monitor resulting a loss of communication. That is not as frequent in Linux as a few years back but it does happen. My experience is about 10% of the distros can get it wrong, even Ubuntu on certain hardware. The best defence is to try more than one Linux.

Depending on how far the installation it is possible to fix the X Window by editing the xorg.conf. I have gone lazy on that front. If I run into an installed Linux having problem in the display at first boot I simply copy the xorg.conf from another Linux that work. Most of the time this method works.

For Ubuntu one can force this distro to boot up with an enforced vesa driver which should work in the majority of cases. Just hit F1 to get instruction help. It is like adding a parameter "forcevesa" at the booting instruction. I cannot be sure if the forcevesa is universal but it is in the Debian family AFAIK.

[retsaw]

Since you have already used the disc maybe it just needs a clean. However I prefer to use flash drives rather than burning .isos, so if you have a spare 700M on a FAT formatted flash drive you can use a tool called unetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) to turn it into bootable drive for Ubuntu. You may want to check your computer can boot from usb flash drives first since some older ones don't support doing this.