Hey guys,
Ive seen a few posts like this but none of them had any good answers.

Basically when I go to install Slackware 12 I get the setup screen open and all of my hard discs are recognized because I can add mount points and such. The problem lies when I go to set the installation source to CD/DVD. It looks for the CD which is very obviously in the tray but it cycles through IDE, SCSI and Parallel Port. At the end of that It displays a message that it will try and look for older devices such as sound blaster. After that I get another message telling me that it was unable to locate the installation source.

After a few hours of playing with that I decided to give open SuSe 10.2 a try. I got a similar message for that too.

I'm just a little bit confused as to why it is doing that. The drive obviously works or else the setup wouldn't load.

Heres a rundown on my hardware:
Pentium E6600 2x2.4gHz
MSI P35 Neo
2 GB PC6400 DDR2 - 1066MHz
LITE-ON IDE CD-R/RW
LITE-ON IDE DVD-R/RW
300gb Western Digital Sata drive.

If you can tell me anything at all. It would help alot. So thanks in advance!

I would suggest burning your iso images using the slowest speed possible, believe it or not this can be a major cause of disc read failures. Also the type of media plays a part as well.

I had a similar issue. On my RHEL4 system, I could not mount the manufacturer's disk containing the source code packages. On my FC5 and Ubuntu 7.04 systems, I had no trouble mounting the CD.

The RHEL4 CD-ROM drive was obviously functional, because 1) I installed the RHEL4 OS using it, and 2) I was able to mount other CDs.

It seems to me that the burn-speed is not the issue.

To be honest I have no idea whats going on. I'm absolutely clueless. Oh well, I have another machine to run Linux off of and it works quite well. Thanks for the help tho guys. Keep me informed if you get anywhere with this problem.

At first I thought the problem for the initial post is your DVD/CD reader/writer, so I thought for nuxeon the problem was related to:

LITE-ON IDE CD-R/RW
LITE-ON IDE DVD-R/RW

I have the same DVD reader/writer and I can confirm that neither the kubuntu install cd nor the redhat fedora core 4 linux installation dvd works (failing at some point during install). The fedore core 4 dvd is telling me it can't continue installation because it needs to know the driver for the device. According to rumours on the internet this DVD reader/writer is able to go into some idle/auto sleep mode so that it basically becomes disabled. I've never heard of such features for DVD readers/writers, but this or the lack of an appropriate linux driver for this particular device may be the problem. I don't see why generic IDE/ATAPI cdrom drivers fail to work on this device though, at least initiating the installation procedure is possible, but then apparently at some point the device becomes unreadable/unmountable for some awkward reason, so that continuing the installation procedure fails to continue for many distros on machines containing this device. Maybe someone more knowledgable than myself can shed some more light on this issue. The only operating systems I could successfully install were Windows and OpenSolaris, so the installation procedure must be doing something different which might already be fixed in newer linux distros.
I've tried installing the latest Ubuntu (7.04, feisty fawn) and the menu comes up, allows me to choose something and when it wants to read the install CD the following message occurs:

Loading isolinux: Disk error 80, AX = 4200, drive FF

Now I'm beginning to think the JMicron I/O controller on my ASUS P5KC motherboard (also dual core) may be responsible for the not functionning of the cd-rom drive since I replaced the lite-on cd/dvd reader/writer with another cd reader/writer and I have the same problems again. (which I never had on other systems with that older cd reader/writer). There is information on the internet that actually suggests this may be the reason, and that alot of kernels do not support JMicron controllers properly.

I have read that the JMicron controller is fully supported by 2.6.18 kernels and up, so this means any install cd of any linux distribution with a < 2.6.18 kernel would fail in most cases without special boot options, excluding alot of install cd's since these usually boot with older kernels. So perhaps you have the same I/O controller or some other exotic I/O controller for all these new SATA/PATA/whatever technologies on your high tech motherboard that ain't supported by older install cd kernels.

JMicron (JMB36x) is present on the following motherboards:

MSI P965 Neo
ASUS P5KC
...

This FAQ from JMicron is interesting (it gives pointers on how to make install CD's work that use < 2.6.18 linux kernel versions) :

http://www.jmicron.com/Support_FAQ.html

The following kernel booting option effectively enabled me to continue the install procedure from the redhat fedora core 4 linux installation cd beyond the "searching for source cd" phase :

linux all-generic-ide=1

Searching for a way to make the install procedure work on the ubuntu install CD's I came accross this page:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Core_2_Duo_Support

I've downloaded Fedora 7 and I can confirm that this works on my system without any required boot options, however the installation tends to hang with kernel messages similar to the ones in this bug report:

http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-b...msg427236.html

This got resolved by attaching my harddisk to SATA port 3 instead of port 1 on my motherboard, and leaving my CD-rom attached to the only available IDE port.