UPDATE 1/12/2006 - THIS HAS BEEN SOLVED - SEE MY 1/12/2006 POST

Hardware is a Dell Optiplex GX150 with a PIII-1GHz (coppermine) processor. 256MB single PC133 dimm. Onboard UATA (ata66 I think). New 80 pin IDE cables installed as part of the troubleshotting process. ATA100 or better hard drives used to test. Stock CD-rom (prolly a 16x or better). Nvidia TNT2 AGP video. Stock system from Dell, really, with the exception of the hard drives. Only add in card is a PVR350 pci card.

Attempting to install R5A26. Install goes fine until the point where the file copy begins onto the hdd. Very, very slow. Hangs at 2 - 6% forever (2+ hours). Lots of hdd activity, but I can not tell why it's going so slow. Never have waited to see if it will finish. Tried two known good hdd, both tested with the manufactures own diagnostics tools. 0's written to the hdd, etc. Always test good. But the install just totally crawls along. There is no UDMA switch in the BIOS, it's just automatic. BIOS was updated to the most current Dell rev for this system, a mid-2004 update. System seems perfectly fine otherwise and was running Win2000 previously. HDD set to primary master and CS during troubleshooting. No diff. 80 pin IDE cables are plugged-in in the proper sequence.

Any ideas on why it's so slow to install knoppmyth?

Sounds like a bad burn. Did you try the "testcd" option on boot up?

Known good CD used to build another system, but I'll do that anyway. The only other thing I can think is that it's a bad cd reader. You just don't expect those things to go bad, but I suppose that's what it could be.

Also could be a writer/reader incompatibility, or the disk could have been damaged in the meantime. The most common cause of a slow install is a bad CD. The next one is probably some trouble with the HD. For that you might also try checking for bad sectors when you format the disk...

It was either a bad CD or the CD-ROM was bad. Switched both out with different CD and reader, and it now installs at normal speed. Have no idea if this setup will work yet, but it's a start.