Brian, Sorry to hear about your problems. I would actually encourage you to try to install some other operating system -- whatever you have lying around. I suspect you're having a hardware problem. I have built about 15 PCs myself, for a business, and those hardware problems can be insane to track down. The computer I'm typing at right now had a 7.3 installation corrupted by some sort of hardware trouble. I went over to a stable box and spent hours figuring out that init had been corrupted during the bad installation. If you're getting kernel panics, it's almost certainly that sort of problem. By the way, I personally found that almost half the motherboards I worked with were flaky in some way or other. Of course, I also drive the DMA hardware full-bore. --Steve Augart Brian Durant wrote:

Hi again,

I have done 3 installs since I last posted an e-mail to the list about my newbie package and network problems (Soyo Dragon Plus! motherboard) and I am totally down on SuSE. I have performed 3 variations of a "normal" install. One with default no office, KDE environment/All of KDE and Help Documentation. The second was a vanilla flavored default no office. The third was a vanilla flavored default with office. In all 3 cases, I was unable to produce a workable install. Two resulted in a kernel panic and the third, could not write LILO to the /mbr. All errors during install are different. kdegraphics and kdemultimedia are the one common denominator. In all three cases, there was a bad magic failure to unpack the archive message. Otherwise, no common denominator. I have checked my RAM and there is no problem there. I think I will go out and purchase Mandrake 8.1.

On Sun, 03 Mar 2002, you wrote: Hi again, I have done 3 installs since I last posted an e-mail to the list about my newbie package and network problems (Soyo Dragon Plus! motherboard) and I am totally down on SuSE. I have performed 3 variations of a "normal" install. One with default no office, KDE environment/All of KDE and Help Documentation. The second was a vanilla flavored default no office. The third was a vanilla flavored default with office. In all 3 cases, I was unable to produce a workable install. Two resulted in a kernel panic and the third, could not write LILO to the /mbr. All errors during install are different. kdegraphics and kdemultimedia are the one common denominator. In all three cases, there was a bad magic failure to unpack the archive message. Otherwise, no common denominator. I have checked my RAM and there is no problem there. I think I will go out and purchase Mandrake 8.1. - As someone mentioned earlier,try another cd-ROM drive(or DVD Drive or something)It may be a hardware problem not a software problem