Can't Install

[bidi]

Hey, I'm new to ReactOS, even though I've been following it for almost a year now. I decided to install version 0.3.0 last night and keep running into the same problem.

It goes through the whole installation process with no errors, but at the very end, when it's reboot time, it says "Flushing Cache" at the bottom of the screen but nothing ever happens after that (I let it sit for over 30 mins at one point). If I then hard-reboot the system I get nothing (it doesn't boot from HD). I search google and this forum and even though it seem other people have had this problem, there's no resolution. The system does get installed, I've booted into a Linux live CD and confirmed that ReactOS is installed, but it doesn't seem that the boot loader is installed as there's no freeldr.sys or freeldr.ini files on the root directory.

Thank you

[Z98]

You can install the boot to a floppy during the installation, so you can boot from floppy instead of directly from the harddrive. Try to see if that works.

[dark]

We need more info about your system (disk partitioning would seem to be the problem, reactos warns during install that it can only handle one primary partition on the HD)

(z98, i don't know if ROS floppy driver was ever restored to working order)

[bidi]

Installing to floppy does work, once I reboot I get the message "Loading Freeloader..." but then it dumps me to a screen that is either filled with green characters or flashes from blue-greenish to blue-greenish with blue characters (the characters aren't in the western alphabet).

FYI, the computer still stops on the "Flushing Cache" stage and I'm forced to reboot manually. Don't know if this could be causing the problem or not.

[bidi]

We need more info about your system (disk partitioning would seem to be the problem, reactos warns during install that it can only handle one primary partition on the HD)

There's only 1 partition on the disk, a 3GB at the beginning of a 20GB disk, the rest is unpartitioned. That partition is where ReactOS is being installed and is marked as the active/boot partition.

The computer is a P3 450MHz (even though it's overclocked to 500MHz) with 128MB of RAM, from what I've read it shouldn't have any problems handling ReactOS.

[Z98]

He's using the 0.3.0 release, not one of the more recent SVN builds.

The flushing cache thing hangs for a lot of us, but generally it hasn't affected the actual install. I'm assuming you installed on a FAT32 partition? That was preformated? 0.3.0 is still a bit iffy on formating by itself, even without the major bugs that began surfacing recently.

[bidi]

The first time I installed it I created the partition using the ReactOS install. Since that didn't work, I created W95 FAT32 partition with cfdisk using a Linux distro, but left it unpartitioned. ReactOS did find the partition and I asked it to format it. The past few times (I'd say roughly 10-15 times) I've been letting ReactOS do the formatting as well. I'll try pre-formatting the drive and installing again.

[bidi]

I got it working! I actually had to move to a completely different computer in order to make it work, this one is a Dell Dimension 4100. Things weren't smooth though, but it did auto-reboot after installation. Had to reinstall it a few times, and I still couldn't get the boot loader to work from the HD, so it was installed on a floppy. After that, I kept getting an error due to a function, which I can't remember what it was called, and fixed it by partitioning and formatting the drive through ReactOS' installation program.

All in all the OS seems pretty neat, but does lack on the stability side. I was about to make it shutdown by itself quite a few times. It also didn't even load my wireless network adapter's setup program on the CD nor did it recognize my floppy drive, which seems kind of wierd since that's usually the only thing that is recognized. Without the wireless adapter there really isn't much I can do. I guess I'll wait until 0.3.1 comes around and give it another shot then.

Thanks for all the help.