i installed rh9 from cd's..and all went great, but afterwards, when i went to install a few programs from cd, my harddrive got very busy...the cdrom light flicked awhile, and i finally got a message saying it was unable to verify a valid disk in the cd drive, please check to make sure it's there, and try again...

fastforward to now...i installed fedora, and the same problem...once it is installed, if i want to add programs from the cd's, it doesn't recognize the cd player or the cd or both(?) and my harddrive just runs wild....i have to reboot to make it stop.

this doesn't happen with suse or knoppix....

any suggestions? i'd love to give fedora a try, if i can make it all work right....

Try this as root:
This will do a raw dump of data on your drive and pipe it to /dev/null. If you don't get the same behavior, it means that there may be something wrong with how your kernel is interacting with the drive. What linux kernel are you running? last time I checked Fedora was passing out 2.4.22 kernels. You can find out by typing "uname -a" at the command line.

I am having the same problem as the original poster. I tried what you recomended ... please see my output.

Linux webwarrior.ewilson.com 2.4.22-1.2115.nptlsmp #1 SMP Wed Oct 29 15:30:09 ES T 2003 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
[root@webwarrior dev]# dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/dev/null bs=2048
dd: reading `/dev/cdrom': Input/output error
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
[root@webwarrior dev]#