I'm back. Where we left off last week was I downloaded two of the five ISO images for installing SUSE 10.1. Since then, I finished getting the last three over the weekend and began the installation by checking the MD5 sums and then burning them to CDs. All appeared well.
I then began the install. As part of the install, SUSE provides a step where you can check the integrity of the five ISO disks. Being a belt and suspender kind of guy, I decided to do so even though I had already checked the MD5 sums. According to this step, all was well with all five disks.
I moved on and took the default install except I added packages required to compile programs from source. Once the installation of these packages began, I got up from my desk and went to do other things because the installer was estimating it would take between two and four hours to complete.
About an hour later, I came back to the desk to check on how things were progressing. I immediately noticed that the screen was showing the system boot screen (the black screen that first comes up when I boot my PC). I was perplexed. Most installers don't reboot the PC unless they are done and, as far as I knew, the install was not completed.
So I completed the boot process and it came up in SUSE 10.1. But no, the install was not done and it asked for the second CD. Hmmm. I inserted the second Cd and it resumed installing packages. At least, until it hit a package that it said was corrupted and I could ignore, abort, or retry. Sigh.
As mentioned earlier, the MD5 sums matched and the SUSE installer checked the integrity of the burned CDs. Yet, the PC had rebooted and now I was being told there was a corrupt package.
That's where I left things. When I have the time to try a new install, I will monitor the progress and see if it reboots again. If so, I guess I can try downloading the first ISO again and burning a new CD. But if that fails, I have to reckon that there is something in my PC's configuration (Intel D815 motherboard, Intel P3 CPU, 512MB of Kingston RAM, Seagate HD, Antec case and power supply) that SUSE doesn't like.
More when I know more.
Aloha!
