CD crashes; invalid argument to mount /dev/loop0 [Solved]

[Workaphobia]

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I sort of created another thread for this, but it had no responses and was a bit outdated, so I deleted it rather than bump it. I hope this isn't considered spammish

Ok, this rather serious problem has been plaguing me for several days. When I try to boot up either the Mandrake Community 10.1 install CD or Mandrake Move, they both crash part-way into the boot process regardless of any permutation of options I try. The exact way the crash is handled varies between the two CDs, but in both cases I end up with a kernel panic and the following error messages in the alt+F3 log screen:

mounting /dev/loop0 on /sysroot/image_boot as type iso9660
mount failed: Invalid argument
unsetting automatic

Elsewhere...

proceeding, please wait...
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(22,7)

[edit] Not sure if this is relevant, but the final kernel messages before the panic:

<6>/sysroot/live_tree_boot.clp&#58; 555 blocks 65536 bytes/block, largest block is 65492 .
<3>/sysroot/live_tree_boot.clp&#58; error -3 uncompressing block 0 65536/61544 256280-262434
<4>isofs_fill_super&#58; bread failed, dev=loop0, iso_blknum=16, block=32

In my limited shell (alt+F2 screen), I see that no image_boot directory exists in /sysroot. If I create it, and then try "mount -t iso9660 /dev/loop0 /sysroot/image_boot", I get "Mount: : Permission denied".

Considering that I installed my operating system off this installation CD, it's pretty disturbing that I can no longer boot to it. I have since upgraded my hardware configuration, and suspect that has led to the problem.


Current hardware (fails):
Motherboard: MSI KT4A-V
Processor: Amd Athlon XP (Not a Barton)
Graphics Card: Nvidia Geforce 2 MX
Memory: 128 MB

Old hardware (back when this was working):
Motherboard: P3B-F (maybe)
Processor: Pentium III
Graphics Card: Diamond Stealth III
Memory: 256 MB

My CD-ROM drive has stayed the same.


Occasionally, instead of the mount error, I'll get some odd out of memory error, but I think that's a fluke. It only happens 15% of the time.

Please, I'm really desperate here. Currently my harddrive installation cannot boot (I messed up my system files, but that's another story that I don't care too much for right now). I've already played with one or two BIOS settings but haven't seen any likely culprits. My next step would be to swap out the cdrom drive and motherboard/processor to narrow down the possible cause, but I may not have time to do that for a while. This is an incredibly frustrating problem, and any help would be *greatly* appreciated.

[Workaphobia]

Fixed! Woohoo! I'm now typing this from my newly restored system, using the most recent nvidia drivers and a set of mouse gestures to activate 3ddesktop, while connecting to the internet through my wireless nvidia adapter.

I began swapping out hardware. The first cdrom drive I switched in did not even boot and is probably broken. The second one crashed a couple of times on read errors (different from the previous bread error that haunted me), but it also successfully booted both mandrake move and mandrake install. I couldn't use "rpm --root /mnt/hda5 /dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5" to reinstall glibc (don't ask what I did to it), but I could use the installation cd's upgrade feature to restore all system rpms.

I have a few lingering side effects, but other than that, the system's in perfect condition!

For those who are interested, the new cdrom drive is a BTC BCD 40XH. The original was a TEAC CD-56E, that for all I know might just need cleaning or something.