Mandrake 8.2 under vmware....

[swiftynz]

i figured that since i almost never reboot my machine that installing linux under a virtual machine would be far more convenient, but i'm having a strange problem.

it boots off the cd fine but when install starts i get the following error:

"Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk. This is probably an hardware error while reading the data. (this may be caused by a harware failure or a Linux kernel bug)"

after pressing ok it says "I can't recover from this. You may reboot your system."

any ideas? the vmware website isn't any help, and a google search hasn't revealed any solutions either.

cheers.

[swiftynz]

remedies tried so far:
took cpu speed back to default
allocated more memory (192mb)

also version of vmware is 3.1

[swiftynz]

doh. oh well looks like no ones ever attempted what i'm doing.... so far i've got win98 running under a virtual machine. it seems to work quite well. on my Duron 1200 its running at about the speed of a P3 450 or so (just an estimate). i was almost expecting it to be full speed tho, lol.

[Artifice]

it sounds like its trying to create a swap file or decompress something onto the cd drive..
perhaps you need to tell it to use another folder for these operations. i know when win95 wouldnt bootdue to corrupet config.sys/autoexec.bat. you could boot off a floppy the had these files and a command to transfer the sys: pointer to the windows dir: ... cant remember much more about it though. i've been playing computer games for too many years and they have turned my mind to mush. have you put a message up on the mandrake community forums?
sombody there is likely to have an answer for you.

[swiftynz]

yea according to the linux guru's on lanchat you're right apart from the cdrom drive bit lol (it says could not decompress second stage ramdisk). they even suggested the same thing, using floppies, although i still fail to see how this could actually help since it will still need to decompress the image to the ram, and this is what's failing.

a msg on the mandrake forums... good idea, cheers. :)

[TheChosen_1]

You have VMWare? I want it, and I bet if you ask SerN he will want it as well!!