The story so far: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

After the events of Part 3, I went to CVS and bought a $14.99 1GB USB stick in the shape of a panda. I had a choice of panda, tiger, or frog, or SanDisk Cruser infected with U3, and of course I wanted to avoid that. Over the weekend I got it home, used gparted to format it to fat32 (painless), ran unetbootin to install the Easy Peasy ISO to it (also painless) and hit the EeePC.

I plugged the stick into the EeePC, turned it on, and hit ESC until the boot device menu came up. I selected the USB stick to be the boot device, the Easy Peasy logo came up, and the LiveCD install ran. Then it asked me a few questions like user name and timezone, then the install process began.

Then about about halfway through, I got this message:

The installer encountered an error copying files to the hard drive:

[Errno 5] Input/output error

This particular error is often due to a faulty CD/DVD disk or drive, or a faulty hard disk. It may help to clean the CD/DVD, to burn the CD/DVD at a lower speed, to clean the CD/DVD drive lens (cleaning kits are often available from electronics suppliers), to check whether the hard disk is old and in need of replacement, or to move the system to a cooler environment.

I tried reburning the ISO to the stick with unetbootin – same error, different percentage progress. I tried burning a different Ubuntu-on-the-EeePC ISO (Eeebuntu) to the stick, with the same result. I went back to Easy Peasy, with the same result, but a further percentage. I used the 4GB SD card in the side of the EeePC instead of the Panda drive to boot from, still no luck.

So what’s the frickin’ problem? Anyone?