Installing Sarge

[livingdaylight]

I recently bought Linux Magazine which came with Debian Sarge in DVD format.

However, during the cd rom scan it ( i think it was) it just hung there at 30% for like ever. I twice tried and failed to install it. It seemed really really slow, which i figured couldn't be right

any ideas why that might have been? I use a Athlone AMd 2800

--
livingdaylight

[livingdaylight]

I recently bought Linux Magazine which came with Debian Sarge in DVD format.

However, during the cd rom scan it ( i think it was) it just hung there at 30% for like ever. I twice tried and failed to install it. It seemed really really slow, which i figured couldn't be right

any ideas why that might have been? I use a Athlone AMd 2800

--
livingdaylight

Thats 14 people looking and still no comment! After many hours. Yikes!

Is help slow to come by here?

--
sophtpaw

[Gary Powers]

I recently bought Linux Magazine which came with Debian Sarge in DVD format.

However, during the cd rom scan it ( i think it was) it just hung there at 30% for like ever. I twice tried and failed to install it. It seemed really really slow, which i figured couldn't be right

any ideas why that might have been? I use a Athlone AMd 2800

--
livingdaylight

Really not a whole lot to go on here. Could be the DVD in the magazine is bad? How long is "long" during the hang?

You might consider downloading the Debian netinstall .iso file, burning to a cd and going from there. My last two Debian installs have been done that way and worked very well.

If you choose that last alternative, be sure to check the md5sum on your download to make sure you got a good one. Google for md5sum if your using Windows right now and you'll find a Win version out there.

Gary

[livingdaylight]

I recently bought Linux Magazine which came with Debian Sarge in DVD format.

However, during the cd rom scan it ( i think it was) it just hung there at 30% for like ever. I twice tried and failed to install it. It seemed really really slow, which i figured couldn't be right

any ideas why that might have been? I use a Athlone AMd 2800

--
livingdaylight

Really not a whole lot to go on here. Could be the DVD in the magazine is bad? How long is "long" during the hang?

You might consider downloading the Debian netinstall .iso file, burning to a cd and going from there. My last two Debian installs have been done that way and worked very well.

If you choose that last alternative, be sure to check the md5sum on your download to make sure you got a good one. Google for md5sum if your using Windows right now and you'll find a Win version out there.

Gary

Ah, someone is alive here! I've never seen such a dead forum. Soz, but its true. I now my question sucks, but common make a newbie welcome and give a helping hand.

It was hanging for like 30 - 45 mins at 30%. There are other distros i could have installed twice in that time. So, i gave up on it. I don't see anything wrong with the dvd.

I'm not in windoze. I'm operating from Ubuntu currently, ran into some sound issues and thought of having Sarge as my stable stable rock to fall back on while i play and experiment with other things. Having come from rpm and dependency hell, i fell in love with the debian way of doing things which eased my alread computer illiterate brain into actually being able to get something going. I always felt fear and awed by Debian, but with the new release, and having been eased into the deb-style with Ubuntu i have come to see that my fears may not have been justified.
But i've not been able to get going. Burning iso is not much fun as far as i'm concerned. I already have several failed attempts at burning Mepis. I wanna keep my few and remaining cd-r for something useful, instead of chucking one after the other into the bin.
If i have a dvd it should work. that is why i got the magazine.
I don't know why one magazine (LF) had Sarge in cd (1or 2cds) and i got it in dvd. Is the dvd too bloated to run on my system. I chose dvd coz i figured it would be a fuller distro and more recent release

Keep it coming,

thank you,

livingdaylight

[lacek]

Maybe the DVD disc itself is corrupted. There is a check option on the CD, choose this before you start the install. Is this hangs as well?
What happens to the DVD drive while the installer "hangs"? Does it seem to try reading (i.e. its LED is flashing), or just sits there?
Can you read the whole DVD from an other operating system?

You can always try downloading the netinst image, burning it to a CD, and try install Debian from that, as Gary Powers said.

[livingdaylight]

Maybe the DVD disc itself is corrupted. There is a check option on the CD, choose this before you start the install. Is this hangs as well?
What happens to the DVD drive while the installer "hangs"? Does it seem to try reading (i.e. its LED is flashing), or just sits there?
Can you read the whole DVD from an other operating system?

You can always try downloading the netinst image, burning it to a CD, and try install Debian from that, as Gary Powers said.

Hi Lacek,

the dvd does have a scratch that i can see, yes. However, i've opened it up in kde (media:/hdd - Konqueror) and everything is there, but maybe the scratch does not allow everything to be read on installation.
How can i check? you say there is a check option? Is that on install or can i check now in my current operating system?

I don't remember to be honest. I think it just sat there.

thank you,

--
livingdaylight

[phaeton]

You can check the disk by booting from it. Instead of hitting enter at the first prompt, type expert, then hit enter. You can select the option to check the media from the menu that comes up. Just follow the prompts.

Another option is to boot with the expert26 command when trying to install, so a 2.6 kernel will be used instead of a 2.4. You can also hit f1 at boot to see other options available.

[livingdaylight]

You can check the disk by booting from it. Instead of hitting enter at the first prompt, type expert, then hit enter. You can select the option to check the media from the menu that comes up. Just follow the prompts.

Another option is to boot with the expert26 command when trying to install, so a 2.6 kernel will be used instead of a 2.4. You can also hit f1 at boot to see other options available.

phaeton, this dvd comes with Kernel 2.6.8
I might try expert mode and follow your hint to select option to check media. Question:
will this lead to automatic or irreversible install. Or can i just check the media this way while being able to come out of install to preserve my current os?

--
livingdaylight

[phaeton]

Nothing should affect your current OS until you start partioning and installing. Just checking the media won't harm anything.

The DVD should have 2.6.8 on it, but the defaut install of sarge is a 2.4 kernel. If you don't specify to use a 2.6 kernel then I believe a 2.4 will be installed.

[livingdaylight]

Nothing should affect your current OS until you start partioning and installing. Just checking the media won't harm anything.

The DVD should have 2.6.8 on it, but the defaut install of sarge is a 2.4 kernel. If you don't specify to use a 2.6 kernel then I believe a 2.4 will be installed.

The latest is that i went back to the bookshop and replaced my dvd with another dvd on a magazine in the Linux rack. I checked it and it is clean as a whistle.
Yet, on my return upon slotting the dvd in i encounter pretty much the same experience.

It does a hardware detection, to find CD-ROM drives, and stops at 84% for about 5 mins at least. When one considers that it shot up to 84% in about 3secs that is a long wait for something to happen. It says, "loading module 'ide-cd' for linux ATAP DISK"
Then it flics up to 86% where it says, "loading module 'ide-cd' for linux ATAPI CD-ROM" and it sits there idle for another 5-10 minutes easy.
No lights in Led, or buzzing sound of work being done in dvd drive. Suddenly blue screen! It would have stayed as a blank blue screen until it very slowly started doing the cd-rom (i think) scan. This is what happened on the previous dvd. It very slowly and laboriously gets up to 30% and then just hangs there and shows no sign of life.
I didn't even bother with the second dvd to get that far. It just is too excruciating to bear. and it had followed the script up till then, and that was enough for me.

I couldn't have pulled two dudd dvd's in a row. Well, its possible but the mathematics tell me the odds are against that happening. What could it be about my machine that it doesn't like?
I've had SuSE, Fedora Core and now Ubuntu on my system and installs have always been smooth so to speak.

so, unless anyone has any ideas i give up for now. When i get a new hard drive, i'll give it a go again. Right now i have to presume it doesn't like something about my system - maybe the harddrive

--
livingdaylight

[phaeton]

Have you tried using the 2.6 kernel as I suggested earlier? You need to type linux26 or expert26.

[livingdaylight]

Have you tried using the 2.6 kernel as I suggested earlier? You need to type linux26 or expert26.

Hi phaeton,

the opportunity didn't arise. I put dvd in tray and off it went as i have described without being offered at any stage yet, whether i want expert install or whatver. I think that might have come later, but it seems that i get stuck in teh preliminary stage, or?? are you saying i should have been able to do 'expert' from the beginning? if so i missed it

thank you
--
livingdaylight

[phaeton]

When you boot from the disk, you should come to a prompt that says to hit enter to continue booting or hit f1 for more options (don't remember exact jargon). You should be able to type linux26 or expert26 at that prompt, then hit enter.

[livingdaylight]

When you boot from the disk, you should come to a prompt that says to hit enter to continue booting or hit f1 for more options (don't remember exact jargon). You should be able to type linux26 or expert26 at that prompt, then hit enter.

Ok. But i thought the point of that exercise was to check whether the disc is corrupt. And as i just got another brand new one, that surely eliminates that possibility.
Besides, i'm not an expert and the dvd should just boot as normal for a default install

--
livingdaylight

[phaeton]

The point of the thread is that you can't get sarge installed, correct? You appeared to eliminate the possibility of a bad disk. Good. Now let's try to get it installed. The default kernel is a 2.4 series kernel, which may have trouble on newer hardware. I'm suggesting you try installing with the 2.6 series kernel to eliminate that as the issue. Once that possibility is eliminated, then we can try to offer you something else to try.

You may want to list the specs of the computer also. Are you using PATA, SATA, or SCSI drives?

[Guest]

However, during the cd rom scan it ( i think it was) it just hung there at 30% for like ever. I twice tried and failed to install it. It seemed really really slow, which i figured couldn't be right

I've had same problem with the Sarge installer, tried installing on 2 different pc's with 2 different cd's and both times, the installer hung around 81% trying to find the cd (DVD) drive. I suggest getting an older install, compiling a newer kernel yourself and the apt-get the newest KDE, Gnome etc.

[Lord Spatchcock]

Yeah, I've had exactly the same. I used the official debian 3.1 roa-i386 binary disks and I've yet to get past 14% of scanning the cd-rom. I've tried it on both my computers, burnt the images at as slow a speed as possible and everything I try doesn't work. I've tested every component of the PC I'm installing to and that's all fine. It's a shame because I've only used red hat a few times before but I'd like to learn linux properly this time.

[Lord Spatchcock]

Y'arr! Just tried the linux26 option at the start by pressing f1 and tried the cd in another drive and it flew through the cd test. I'm not kidding, I've wasted about a day on this looking for information and this is the first place which has had any info on the problem.

If anyone is interested, the PC I'm trying this on is a K7S5A with a 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird, a matrox parhelia and 256Mb of ddr ram... it did have an extra 512Mb of ram but I found this to be faulty last night.

[livingdaylight]

Well, i'd like so say that i have at last installed Sarge Only took me a few weeks so nothing to brag about, i know.

Anyone checking in, my advice is, if using the dvd, not to do a straight install. Go F1 and then choose linux26. I don't recommend expert unless you do know what you are doing. My way i had a basic system installed but it still took a while for someone who was expert to come and reconfigure X and tweek about.

Good luck! or better still good knowledge and research are prerequisites for this install. Oh, and perseverance

P.P.P

livingdaylight