dual-boot installation of Mint to second hard drive?

[Nicholas]

I just made an attempt to install Mint 4 on my second hard drive (slave) and after going through the initial setup challenges, had the installation fail. The error message was one which stated: the drive is no good, the installation disk is no good, or the CD/DVD drive is no good. All are in good condition and I was only recently using the disk in question for Win XP Pro without any problems. The disk was wiped clean and checked prior to my Mint 4. attempt. The CD was ordered from the Linux Mint distribution center and only arrived today. The CD/DVD drive is reasonably new (1 month) and has been working perfectly. I checked the setup box to use the entire 40GB 2nd drive and indicated it for the installation properly - the setup was accepted and going well then just quit. I then restarted the computer and it booted into Windows XP - so I was indicating the correct drive. The error message was ERRNO 5 (Input/Output Error) I tried it 3 times - even tried it once in Manual Install, but I couldn't figure out the numbers necessary for the different partitions. The drive has vanished from XP Control Panel and belongs to Mint now, but it won't install. I can still run the Live Disk and run Mint - I'm using it now to access this site. It works pretty well, I even copied and saved a couple of happy faces to XP and they were there in the Mint folder I had created for Linux. That was amazing. Now if I could only get it to install. It gets about 38% into the setup and quits. Anyone know what to do?

[Husse]

Please don't write so "compact" - think of the people to read it
I first had one idea, but it was not that, but it's worth mentioning here.
If you put the first stage of grub (under Advanced in the last screen of the install) on another disk than you install on you have to block gfx - meaning that you comment out like this
##gfxmenu=/etc/grub/message.mint
or you'll get an error message that you can bypass.
But it was not this, so I don't go into it in detail.
Please tell us what 38% is, what have you passed by and what is it to do now - else we have to start an install to find out.....

[Nicholas]

Thanks for the reply - I begin the installation, enter the necessary info, use the "Use entire disk" option instead of Manual, because I'm not familiar with entering the correct sizes for the partitions. The installation begins and goes smoothly, up to 38% completed on the installation meter line when the error message pops up. That's all. There is no indication of anything wrong up to this point. The CD is one ordered from the site because I couldn't get the MD5sum to work on the one I downloaded and later burned. The CD seems fine, since I can open Mint and use it as I please - changing the desktop, connecting to the internet, etc,. When the error pops up - there is only the Cancel option available, so when I cancel, I am returned to the CD Mint window, which continues to work as a "live CD." Don't know where to go from here... I have scoured your website for any mention of this particular issue, and found nothing. I'm stumped.
N.

Addendum: Is it possible that the OS disk has been burned at too high a speed? In this case, could I copy it to another blank disk at a lower speed? In reviewing the error message (ERRNO-5) it is recommended to try using a lower burn speed for the data, but since I purchased the disk from a Linux source, I assumed it would have been prepared at the proper speed. Just a thought - any suggestions?