[atconc]

Hi,

I'm trying to install linux on an old box that isn't beeing used for anything at the moment. I've downloaded the 3 iso images for redhat 9

When I boot from the first cd I get the welcome to linux screens and the media check works ok then after the media check screen I get

"Error 2 reading header:cpio:bad magic"

in a blue panel taking up the top half of the screen the bottom half says:

[I]Running anaconda, the red hat linux system installer - please wait..
exec: bad address
install exited abnormally
sending termination signals...done
sending kill signals...done
disable swap...
unmounting filesystems...

you may safely reboot your system.

The system is a slot1 pentium 3 500mhz on an old gigabyte mobo
330mb ram
17gig seagate HD
old generic CDROM
16 gare 128 graphics

Also the system is tempremental about booting from cd- even though it is set to in the bios it only boots from cd roughly 1time out of every 3 or 4.

Trying to install from cd because I don't have a working floppy drive to put in the system

System was previously running win2k

[codejockey]

I suspect your image was corrupt when you burned it to CD. Did you verify the checksum before burning it? The "bad magic" error means that Linux was expecting to find a cpio archive, and although it found a file with the correct name, the internal information was not consistent with what it expected for a cpio archive. Translation: data error.

Hope this helps.

[atconc]

I didn't verify the checksum - how do I go about doing that? I'm quite competent with hardware stuff and windows, but I@m a complete linux virgin

thanks for your help

*update* I've run the disk checker that loads as part of the install and it says cd1 is bad - how do I find out if it's a bad download or a bad burn? If it is a bad download how do I avoid it happening again.

[codejockey]

Often, a download site will post the checksum for each file available for download. These are sometimes called md5sums, after the method used to compute them. Anyway, you need to download the sum (it's a very small file, usually less than 100 bytes), compute the sum on the .iso image you downloaded, and compare it with the sum from the download site. If they match, your download is perfect, and you can go ahead and burn. If they don't, there's no easy way to tell where the difference(s) is/are, but it really doesn't matter -- anything less than a perfect download puts you at risk.

Linux includes a program to compute the md5 sum for you (md5sum); if you've used Windoze to download the .iso, and need to compute the sum in Windoze, there are similar programs available (one such program is available at http://www.pc-tools.net/win32/freeware/md5sums/ and there are others).

Hope this helps.

[atconc]

thanks - I've established that the sum is the same using that tool so it must be a bad burn, I'll try burning again

[Squashman]

It could be your cd drive. I had a similar issue and I swapped out the cd drive and the graphical install finally started.

[atconc]

thanks, I was just coming back to post the same think when I got the notification of your message - out of curiousity I ran the media check part of set up on my xp box and it passed all the media, that might explain why the other box only intermitantly boots from cd - I think the drive in it is from the stone age!

Will see if I have an old cd drive around anwhere to swap it for

thanks for ur advice

[atconc]

It certainly seems to be the cd drive - it was made in 1997 so no suprise there - the cds work fine in my other box

[codejockey]

Glad to hear that you may have identified the problem!

Note that there are (always) two issues whenever you download and burn data to a CD:

(1) is the download correct?
(2) is the burn correct?

It is possible to have a successful download (i.e., satisfy (1)), but still generate data errors when burning to CD (which may be what happened in your case). On Linux, you can check both your download and your burn using the md5sum command (you sum the downloaded image to verify the correctness of the download; you sum the CD data (after burning) to verify the correctness of the burn).

Again, nice work sorting things out.