[CLUE-Tech] Stumped by laptop installation

[Jeffery Cann]

Greetings.

I am helping a friend at work set up Mandrake on his
Micron Transport NX laptop.  It's a P2, circa 1999. 
It's sporting a combo DVD/CDROM drive, manfactured by
Matsushita, model UJDA510L.

The graphical installation works fine, so I know the
video card is not an issue.  The problem is with
certain packages.  We are seeing either cpio /
segmentation fault or MD5 checksum errors when trying
to install RPMS either from the installation program
or manually.  We have tried to use the --nomd5 flag
for rpm.  We have tried other sets of media.  

The system will boot, by not into runlevel 5 because
the problem packages are the kdebase and kdelib.

I am thinking one of several possibilities:

1. Bad Karma.  What can you do about bad karma?

2. Bad DVD/CDROM driver.  Unlikely, since other
packages installed correctly?

3. Errors in HDD.  I forgot to check this, but he told
me that he 'checked for bad blocks' when formatting
the HDD during installation.

4. DVD firmware upgrade.  After some google'ng, I
found this thread: 
http://www.driverguide.com/boards/matsushita/1406.html
Apparently there is/was a firmware upgrade.  Panasonic
/ Matsushita site turned up ziltch on a search based
on the model number.

5. Punt on the CD installation and do a network
install.

I'm stumped and I appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks
Jeff

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http://jefferycann.com/

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