[QCLUG] Newbie having installation errors

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 02:43:54AM -0600, Noah Norris wrote:
> but usually this happens on old hardware with big drives.

On any hardware which has a BIOS setting controlling the access mode for the
drive which is set to the wrong value, causing Linux to see the drive as IDE
(PATA) instead of SATA.

> actully this reminds me of a corrupt partition table whch could be caused by
> the way dell set it up or vista. ( sometimes these problems can be a pain)
> dell diag partition or there media fast boot partition. (alothough less
> likely cause you tried a full install)

I've never heard of any such partition table corruption.  If the partition
table itself is corrupted, I would expect the failure to happen when trying
to repartition, not when trying to format.

> dell laptops can be picky about cdrom's / dvd used  if you used a dvd try a
> bootable cd (also your dvd came out of a magizine might of had an problem
> with it also might of been customed from the normal cd's not sure but maybe
> a different kernel etc etc also try one version behind )

There's really no evidence that this is a problem with the optical media.
Especially if you're using the standard Ubuntu installer, to get the point
of even trying to partition the disk, the kernel has successfully loaded a
compressed squashfs containing all the root filesystem used by the live
environment; it's highly unlikely that all of this works but that precisely
the bits needed for ext3 formatting are corrupted - even more unlikely that
the same problem would affect two separate CDs, which AIUI is how many Luis
has already tested.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com                                     vorlon@debian.org