Help with my PC
 

For some reason i'm trying to install SUSE linux and i get a "crc error system-haulted" error. And just to make sure it's not software related i tried installing windows from a cd i had laying around of xp, and when it booted off the cd, the screen went blank. I'm lost and this is aggrivating.

Google is your friend here. I got 290 hits right away. Try it...

Mabye there's interference from antivirus or the like and do the install in safe mode, or the video drivers are corrupt/need to be updated(?). Their website or windows help(ha) may have more answers.

A problem with your Linux CD. Try cleaning it or redownload it.

ianc

As above. No question about. Bad or dirty CD.

Its telling you that its trying to read a file off the CD, but when it does an integrity check on the file, its coming up as corrupt. 99% of the time it because you burned a CD and it just bad. Try remaking the CD, and burn it at a slower rate.

Hmm, he said it didn't work with the XP CD either. I would look at the CD drive as the culprit. Is the system in a dusty environment?

I think i may have figured it out, i checked the online manual for my motherboard and it turns out that there is a jumper for write protecting the boot sector. Normally the jumper is there, which is the default state of disabled. However for some reason the jumper is missing which would enable boot sector write protect. Now i need to find a damn jumper cap, does anyone actually sell those things?

Nope, didn't work. I'm getting aggrivated here, i don't understand why it's not booting off of a cd.

Your first message seemed to indicate that you were at least able to boot off the CD, but that something went wrong during the setup. Your last message makes me think you can't even boot from it. Which is it?

At this point, your best bet is to just take the CD to another machine and try booting it from that CD. If the other machine boots up from it properly and starts the setup program, then the problem is not the CD, in which case you should take another look at your CD drive as 87coupe suggests.

Provide more details as to exactly what's going wrong and when.

ianc

I'm sorry, my computer vocabulary is not the best.
I'll describe what happens with each cd, maybe that will help.
With a windows xp cd, it gets to the point where it asks to press any key to boot off of the cd. I press enter, screen goes blank. At this point i'd expect it to go to the blue screen and start uncompressing windows setup. But it stays blank, which i guess means that the systems is haulted.
With the SUSE cd, the cd boots into the installation menu. At this point if i just do a straight installation, just like with the xp cd, the screen blanks out and does nothing. If i change the display mode to text mode, it will do the "uncompressing linux crc error system-haulted" .
With the partition cd, the menus for the settings flip by while you pick the settings specific to your computer, such as video card type, etc. When that finishes it tries to start what i think is the main menu, but again the system is haulted during the process.
I hope this will better help describe what's going on.

OK, I'm changing my stance and saying there's a problem with your machine now. I was inattentive and didn't read the portion of your first post that said the XP installation CD failed also (unlike 87coupe). If both of these CD's are failing and they are KNOWN GOOD CD'S(?!), then look into a BIOS upgrade for your motherboard. Check also for a firmware update for your CD\DVD drive (whatever it is). Or (easiest), try another CD drive if you have another handy. Make sure the drive has the correct IDE or SCSI ID jumper setting.

What are the details of this hardware anyway? Is the machine old?

ianc

Not that old, i built it maybe 2 years ago or so. I've actually tried this on both of my drives, one is a cdr, the other a dvdr.
I'm not sure how to do a bios upgrade, because i'm never had to do one before. Same thing with the cd and dvd drive firmware.
As far as the hardware, there's the mentioned cd and dvd drive, opteron proc, asus motherboard, 80 gig HDD, ATI Radeon video card, and 1.5 gig of memory.

Hardware doesn't sound like it should be a problem, although I have had some dicey issues with Asus boards in the past. The first thing to ascertain however is that the Linux CD is good. If you can successfully boot another machine off it and get further into the setup than you can on your own (without making any changes to that machine of course), then we can safely say the problem is with your machine. The fact that both of your drives are not allowing you to boot points me to your mobo.

Usually you can get into the CMOS setup program when your machine is booting by pressing the DEL or F1 key or something similar. You may not see this if your mobo displays some splash screen when it's first booting. If so, you may be able to circumvent this by pressing ESC. Check the settings in the CMOS to make sure all looks good as far as booting from CD's goes.

Also, as I mentioned before, you should check that both of your drives are jumpered correctly. Typically, an IDE controller can have two devices connected to it: a master and a slave, and your two drives are probably on the secondary IDE controller, while your HD is on the primary. Check the jumper settings on your CD\DVD drives to make sure they're correct. The drive at the end of the cable should be master. If they're set for cable select, change them to master\slave. The drives should have a little diagram printed on them at the back to tell you what jumper pins to put the jumpers on for master or slave configuration.

Try again. If still no go, check what version BIOS your board is currently at. You should see this info when you first power the board up. Check the Asus website for your model of board to see if there's anything newer available. If so, you might want to flash your mobo to the later version of the BIOS. Typically the BIOS is a relatively small program that fits on a floppy disk. Various mobo manufacturers have different ways of flashing the BIOS. Some have a dedicated program that goes on the floppy with the BIOS, others have you press a particular key when you're booting up with the floppy. The Asus website will have instructions on your particular board on how to do this.

Let us know how it goes...

ianc

Well i tried everything you mentioned and then some.
Finally i got frustrated, and decided that i built my pc enough of a time ago to update my parts. After replacing things one by one, and trying them to see if it made a difference, turned out that replacing the HDD got it to boot off of the windows CD. The SUSE was still not happy (bad cd and dvd drives?), but the windows actually caught and started working. So anyhow, all ends well except my wallet, since i replaced everything except the cdr and dvdr drive.