Linux Mint Forums

I've been trying to install Mint 6 from the liveCD today, but it keeps giving me one of two errors:

1. CRC error - boot will go so far as loading vmlinuz & init, which go fine, and then a crc error --System Halted error pops up
   
   or, if it gets past this screen without a crc error (which it does ~20% of the time), it will give me a VFS error
2. VFS: unable to mount root FS on unknown block (8,1)

This issue is not isolated to Mint. I have an openSUSE install and a Windows 7 beta install on the internal drive, neither of which boot (SUSE has the same errors, but a different unknown block, and Windows gave me a 'physical hard error'). I've tried every Linux liveCD I have (Ubunto 8.04, Fedora 10, Mandriva One 2009, and Mint 6) - they all give their own flavour of the same errors, just at different points in the boot process, and with different unknown block numbers. They also all work fine in other computers.

I've been getting these errors on an intermittent basis for the last couple of months (mostly when booting from the internal drive) through Ubuntu, Mint, openSUSE, XP and Vista installs. In the past I was able to boot up after a few restarts, but now there seems to be no getting past these errors.

Could this be my hard drive dying? I haven't found much help through Google, but maybe someone here can point me in the right direction. Any input you've got would be appreciated.

It's hard to tell what's going on
Is this the live CD or the installed version?
Because if it's the installed version and the liveCD works and installs fine on another machine (as I think you say) I'd say that hardware failure is very likely
There are small programs from the hard disk manufacturers that can test the disk - do that

Thanks for the response. Sorry if my description was confusing; I had trouble figuring out exactly how to describe it.
I have experienced these errors both when using the liveCD and from the installed version. Yes, the liveCD works fine and installs on another machine. I'll follow your suggestion about testing the hard disk.