[ SOLVED ] error message- error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hdo'.

[Şerban S.]

[...] error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hdo'.
The specs on this laptop are: RAM 2 GB; HD 130 GB; Pentium M 1.73 GHz [...]

Hello!
As far as I can guess:
(1) You're out of space on the drive. Although, given my experience, you can fit in even a larger distro (say... a 2,5 GB ISO...).
(2) The drive is very old, I would say an ATA. This might give this error, due to the reading mode, which is different (CHS, instead of LBA).
We need more info about the drive, such as available space on each partition, the drive type (IDE, E-IDE, ATA ??) since this matters a lot when it comes to formatting.
There are too many possibilities and based on this info, it's very difficult to make guesses. The drive might also be damaged and the first sector unreadable.
I would run a diagnostic distro, such as GParted Live, to check the drive for faulty sectors, available space and the rest.
Formatting might be OK, but drive's state is critical. Especially the first sector, first cylinder (first 512 bytes of the drive), where the bootloader writes some data.

Hope that gave you at least a hint, to move forward!

[JanetBiggar]

I couldn't take a screenshot of the message as this is occurring when I start up an older Dell Latitude D610.  The message in full is:

error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hdo'.
error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hdo'.

Press any key to continue..._

I am simply wondering what this means and if I need to do anything?

It will boot into LL 3.8 regardless of whether I "press any key to continue" or simply when I wait it will automatically boot up and in fact it pulls up the LL 3.8 login screen faster if I simply wait rather than pressing a key.  It then appears to function fine and so far I have not experienced any issues.

The specs on this laptop are: RAM 2 GB; HD 130 GB; Pentium M 1.73 GHz

I loaded LL 3.8 from a USB that I made from a new install on which I had made a bunch of changes (added various programs that I always want on each install, etc).  I have used this same USB for the past 4-6 months with no issues.

I have used this same USB for two other laptops that I received at the same time (about 2 weeks ago) and while they are newer models (I use that loosely!) I do not get this message.

I did see a similar post with the same first line, however theirs didn't have the option to "press any key to continue" and sounds like they had bigger issues...