Dead hard drive?

lots · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Mar 2003 Posts: 95

Alright i had no issues installing gentoo on my laptop. Everything seemed great but now about 6 months after installation (i needed to clean things up so i opted to reformat) the laptop wont take the gentoo cd (even the same one i used to build it with origionally) i burned new ones just to make sure the cd wasnt messed up in any way, i tried the cds in other machiens.. it was fine. So then i figure ill try other distros just to be sure .. SuSE Knoppix and Slack all have the same issue the Gentoo live cd had on initial booting of the various installers. SuSE would just black out, Slackware actually got to a root prompt but fdisk wouldnt function, Gentoo would hang for a while and then get to a really messed up # prompt, where the cd does not mount and the installer cannot continue (i dont even get the standard screen after it gets to the # prompt) and knoppix complains for a bit and then stalls.

The odd thing is both the current install of gentoo and winXP are running fine no problems what so ever, other than the fact i cannot reinstall gentoo (the main reason for the reformat is to set up gentoo starting from another stage, now that i know what im doing a little bit more, plus i broke emerge

and am curently too lazy to figure out what went wrong

not that its all that important.. but i liked the ease of use when updating software.. i could always go back to using tarballs.. but then it would be jsut like using slack

Liathus · Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2003 1:06 pm Post subject:

I don't think its your hard drive that is dead. More likely the cdrom. In your current windows or linux installations can you use your cd-rom ok?

lots · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Mar 2003 Posts: 95

yep CD works fine..

its still underwarrantee.. maybe i should just send it in eh?

BradN · Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2003 1:25 am Post subject:

did you change any hardware or bios settings between when you first installed and now?

lots · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 11 Mar 2003 Posts: 95

well considering its a laptop.. i havnt touched any of the hardware.. plus i have no need to.. since all i do is coding among other things for school work/work .. as for bios i havnt touched it since installation of xp and gentoo.. it just appears to have stopped working..

so again today i tried to reinstall with hotplug disabled.. figuring maybe it had something to do with that.. but all i get is a non funcitonal commandline and a message saying failure to mount the cd.. when obviously it had just loaded the cd to get to the boot screen.. puzzelling no? i am confused..

im definately thinking its hardware related due to the fact that it worked once before.. and wont work again.. for any linux distro.. i've not tried windows.. but i may in a few days to see if i can get the installer to load.. tho windows has usually been less sensitive in the past for me so it may work.. but who wants windows

BradN · Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2003 10:07 pm Post subject:

Alternatively you could try one of the gentoo 1.2 era boot CD's that load the entire thing into ram before booting the kernel. Then you just need a network connection to download the stagex image.