My CD Drive was dumped on a failed install
 

I am trying out a few different flavours of LINUX on PC's in an educational establishment in order to decide which option we go with for next year.
Machines in question are all DELL Optiplex PIII-450's with 128MB RAM

Having succesfully installed Xandros on 1 PC, and then RH9 on a second PC(dual booting with Win98); then a clean install of Mandrake 9.0 on a third, I was feeling fairly confident with my partitioning etc.

I moved to another machine to install Fedora and went through the setup. It started to install and then suddenly killed the installation saying that it could not install the base package. On reebooting, I found out why - there was no longer a CD-ROM listed in the BIOS - booted into Windows fine, but still no CD drive, even after setting up the required real mode drivers in the config.sys

I then attempted a Mandrake 9.0 to 9.2 upgrade on a clean machine with the same resulting problem.

Now I am left with 2 PC's 'without' CD-Drives

Please help if you can!

TIA

Hi Hoopla!

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org. Is that by any chance a LG Cdrom? I've heard Mandrake likes to toast some of them :)

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...03/10/4/108969

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...213193986.html

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=108472

I've realized Mandrake was bad since long time ago... I really don't like drakes :S

Many thanks for those links Megaman; they make interesting reading - though it is too late for me now as it was an LG Drive.. LOL!
That explains the Mdk 9.2 install problem - but Fedora did the EXACT same thing...any references that you are aware of?

I hate making simple mistakes - but I guess I'm learning! :)
Thanks again for your help.

I did find this 'fix' - I just wonder....

http://www.billgrady.com/mt/archives/000160.php

or here http://us.lgservice.com/ (under the Device Driver Link)

Great Hoopla!

Thanks for replying and sharing the link with the community. Of course you should have an LG CD-rom. Once I bought a motherboard and a processor. The mother board had no guaranty while the processor had. Both worked fine for a week. After a week, my computer stopped working. Nothing at all. Completely dead ... It could only be memories (cheap) mother board (no guaranty) and the processor. Which one was broken? Indeed, the motherboard. Murphy laws applies for both of us in this case:

http://dmawww.epfl.ch/roso.mosaic/dm/murphy.html

So, there's actually a "cure" for it huh :). I've to bookmark that link in the case a friend faces that enemy :)

Good luck with the fix. I really hope it works for you.

Cheers!