Older PC question

[Rashkae]

mdovell at comcast.net wrote:
> 
> Again this a Athelon xp 2.2 ghz I think, 512 of ram…the system is five years old 
> 
> This is getting more than annoying because I’ve burned nearly a dozen or so dvd’s of ubuntu but most didn’t work well. I took the advice of going to a 32 bit one and it helped to a degree but not all the way. Basically on 9.04 on one of them I got to install at about 58% and it said there was an error (see 1-3 below). Then one to 75% and said it was an error as well. Oddly enough one did let me into the Live boot. I could actually go online with ease although the resolution was lower. I should note that my DVD’s are at least four or so years old. Some were these top of the line (at the time). Is there any way to maybe download it while it is on the live cd? If I download a iso and boot from dvd would it recognize the iso and reboot from that? 
> 
> 
> I'm starting to think that one or more of the following is true. 
> 
> 1) my dvd-r's are old and not that good 
> 
> 2) the hard drive on the pc isn't reading or working well 
> 
> 3) the dvd drive itself has to be cleaned. I think I have a cleaner cd somewhere in the house. 
> 
> Has anyone else had problems installing? 
> 
> 


Make sure you verify the DVD's on a known working computer.  That should
be a simple as booting the DVD and run the integrity check.

once you know you have a working good DVD, then run the memtest on your
target computer, let it run at least 5 hours.

Assuming that passes with no errors, boot to a live cd and run badblocks
-v /dev/sda to validate that your hard drive isn't running into a bunch
of bad blocks.

Run the DVD integrity check on your target computer.  This will verify
that the DVD drive itself is able to read the entire disk.

After having finished verifying that the hardware is still in working
order, then, for a low memory pc, I *strongly* suggest downloading and
installing from the alt-install.iso. (Sorry I forgot to mention this
earlier.. would you believe, on the dozens of computers I've installed
Ubuntu, I never yet finished the install from that GUI they put on
regular CD's.. I just take for granted someone is using the alt-install)

ftp://ftp.telus.net/pub/ubuntu/9.04/ubuntu-9.04-alternate-i386.iso