error in exec of stage2 /mandrake

First let me say I am not a linux guru by any means but I really want to learn this OS. I have installed red hat in the past and didn't really like it so I thought I'd try out Mandrake 8.1. So I went to wal-mart and bought Mandrake 8.1, set my BIOS to "no" PNP os's installed, and boot to CDROM. Everything started out good, but only for a short while. While it is "Loading program into memory...." It stops and I get these messages.

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

Then a bunch of stuff about unmounting drives, etc. And tells me I can now shut down my system safely.

So I shutdown my computer and restart thinking this is only a one time occurance - and then I get this error below.

"error in exec of stage2 :-(
FATAL ERROR IN STAGE1: not a directory

I can't recover from this.
You may reboot your system."


Anyone know what the deal is, all my hardware works great in windows and the machine runs good otherwise.

Specs:
intel 815 chipset
128 MB RAM
1000 Mhz

I really want to install Mandrake if someone can give me some ideas of my problem....

I did search google but i couldn't find a solution!

Thanks,

Arash,

uh oh, this MIGHT be your harddisk crashing...
but then not. most times its a configuration problem. did you change anything recently about your boot configuration? then you probably didn´t re-run the boot-loader or something.

if noone else encountered the same problem, you probably won´t get much help though, since this is quite a general error.

can you boot from the cdrom again and start kinda "emergency system"?

another thing could be mandrake not supporting the ramdisk on a cylinder>1024 but not checking for that. i assume you installed linux after installing windows, so it is on a partition on the end of your harddisk, is it?

Why are you disabling pnp in your bios? Mandrake 8.1 supports pnp. Why don't you turn it back on and try again?

the pnp setting in the bios has the effect that (if set to "non-pnp-os") it initializes the pnp cards for you.
some (old) hardware doesn´t like to be double-initialized, so you need to tell the bios not to do so if you have this kind of cards.

other it does not matter.

By the way, I installed linux after installing windowsXP and after that I installed an older version of mandrake which works perfectly. Then I heard about the newer version of mandrake and when I wanted to install the newer version -8.1- begon this problem. So at the install moment the boot manager was LILO.
I tried the same cd on another pc onwhich was also winXP installd and exprienced the same prob!!
couldn't be my CD? Maybe I need a new one?

The prob was indeed my cd. I just downloaded 8.1 ISO and burned it on the new CD. With this cd goes everything right.
Thanks guys,