misleading error message

[Chuck Kollars]

The error message "There was an error installing [package].  This can
indicate media failure ..." can apparently mean more than one thing.  It
can mean what it says: typically a problem with the CD drive or the CD. 
It can _also_ mean some other subtle problem with the hardware was
encountered during installation.  You can even encounter both problems
on the same system, which is quite confusing (just one error message 
provoked by two totally separate problems).  Many people never see the
message, but a few people see it so often they can't get past it, 
especially when they're trying to "repurpose" very old hardware.

I wish RedHat's install provided just a little more information to help
disambiguate this error message.  First, when testing CD & media, please
provide some measure of the quality of the CD drive & media (perhaps a
scale of 0-10) rather than just a PASS/FAIL indication.  And second,
when the error message occurs tell us just a little more, such as which
devices had interrupts outstanding or which devices had IO operations 
that weren't completed.

I first encountered this message because I had _two_ flaky CD drives and
some too-cheap CD blanks.  Swapping out a suspect CD drive but still
seeing the same error was quite misleading.  I eventually fetched a
_third_ CD drive and nailed that problem.  Don't skip the media check;
CD and CD drive problems are the most common (but not the only) cause 
of this error.

But even though my media problem was fixed, the error message wouldn't
go away.  In the absence of information, superstition took over: move the
ribbon cables, put hard drives on different IDE channels to avoid any 
possible interference, swap masters and slaves, put the cabinet cover on
to reduce possible interference from outside, temporarily power off all 
the fans (except the CPU) to eliminate any possible electrical noise, 
replace the ribbon cables, switch to "cable select" or explicit jumpers,
turn off Plug'n'Play, check every one of the BIOS settings, remove 
possible antenna wires such as a CAT5 jumper cable, turn off the 
electrostatic air filter that was in the room, switch to auto partition 
or disk druid, switch to text or GUI, remove unnecessary cards to reduce 
chances of power brownout, reseat all connectors, reseat the RAM, blow a 
brand new BIOS, force all disk partitions to be reformatted, replace the 
CMOS battery, etc.  I doubt any of that hurt  ...but none of it solved 
the problem and none of it was necessary (in fact it risked introducing 
yet another problem).

Something about changing a ribbon cable did have a noticeable effect
(delaying the problem a couple more minutes further into the install), 
but in hindsight I think that was just a fluke not related to the real 
problem.  After more fiddling it seemed the problem was somehow related 
to a mouse interrupt and a CD drive interrupt happening at the same time, 
but even knowing that didn't suggest to me what to do about it.

What finally worked was to remove a 256MB DIMM. The BIOS recognized the
DIMM, and `memtest` said it worked fine on that motherboard.  But the 
manufacturer's documentation for my hardware said only up to 128MB DIMMs 
were supported.  So I took out the 256MB DIMM and tried the install 
again and voilà.

good luck!
--
Chuck Kollars - principal Kollars Informatics
Ipswich, Massachusetts, USA