installation cannot find cd
 

this is really weird problem:
boot up from the Fedora Core 2 cd and it gets stuck (for about 1-2 minutes)at the running /sbin/loader line and then asks me what media i want to install from, I choose local CDROM and i wait another 1-2 minutes and i get an error: CD Not Found, the Fedora Core CD was not found in any of your CDROM drives. Please insert the Fedora Core CD and press OK to retry.

I know the CDs are good because the images passed md5, and the install cd WORKS on another computer! (that computer boots into the installer very quicky and immediate asks if i want to check the media - i did, and it passed.... the bad computer however just pauses for 1-2 minutes and never gives me that option):confused:

i'm not sure if it's hardware, i used to have two TDK VeloCD burners on the secondary IDE, i've tried the boot cd from each of those, and then i even tried two additional CDRW or DVD drives and the same problem.

how can the CDROM regonize the CD to boot into the installer and then not detect the CD? that's weird. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

p.s. I ALSO had the same problem with Mandrake 10.0 install CDs, where it'll boot into the installer but then never find the CD.


oh, i forgot to post my current hardware specs:
AMD Athlon 1600+
890+ MB DDR RAM
Primary Master 60g Western Digital
Primary Slave 40g Maxtor
Secondary Master - 16X DVD-rom (don't know the brand)
GeForce 4 MX
SB Live! 5.1

it could be a hard problem if you have another computer i'd say setup a nfs server and install it over the network.
i probably guess bad cdrom drive. but i've so seen cdrom drives that are picky about what kind of burned cds they read so i'd try burning it on a different brand of cds if its available.

it turns out that i somehow screwed up the secondary busmaster:

here's how it all began:

i was unsatisfied because the burners were running on PIO mode instead of DMA, so i installed a bunch of VIA PCI busmaster for windows... it still didnt change the settings, someone recommended that i delete the secondary IDE device and restart so that windows can redetect it and possibly find DMA access... windows never did, it kept halting saying that it cannot install the drivers. so i figured it was one of many things wrong with windows, so i decided to install linux

but i guess it cant be a software problem since by installing linux, i've never even entered windows and it still doesnt find the cd... on the initialization for Fedora Core 2, the installer searches for the drives but pauses for a long time when trying to get Direct Memory Access on the secondary IDE drives... so maybe the software broke the hardware permanently?

(i used to have both HDD on primary and both CD/CDR on secondary, but after i switched a CD with a HD so that each bus has 1 HDD and 1 CD/CDR then i can boot correctly if the CD is in the primary IDE's cdrom but not the secondary one's)