Disk error during 9.10 installation

[nrobinson]

Hello,

I got my sister who lives several thousand km away to install 32 bit ubuntu 9.10.

Her pc has a single IDE hdd. During installation the option "use whole disk" was selected.

At 23% the instillation failed while copying the files to the hdd.
The error was something like "Error copying files ... please clean the instillation cd, etc..."

She ran a check of the instillation disk integrity from the try/install/etc menu that appears after booting to the disk.

This check was passed.

Is there any way using the live cd that I can get her to check her hdd for problems before I send her off to buy another one?

Thanks,
Nathan

[lemming465]

First have her boot with the memtest86+ option and test her RAM for least 20 minutes, or maybe overnight. Assuming the memory checks out at OK, see the faulty hardware help page (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FaultyHardware) for some advice on using either smartctl or badblocks to verify the disk integrity.

[QIII]

Start the memtest just before bed and let it run.

20 minutes is definitely not enough.

[bumanie]

Sometimes an alternate cd installation of ubuntu overcomes these issues as it is text based - it may be worth a try, however doing a memtest first (as suggested above), will not do any harm. It will at least rule out a problem with ram if all comes up OK. Sometimes is worth doing an md5 checksu (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM)m of your download to ensure the download was not corrupted in any way.