Hi,

I'm taking the plunge into Linux and dual-booting with Windows (XP Pro sp2) and thought Ubuntu looked pretty interesting.

I have Partition Magic 8 to use with Windows. I set aside 15GB of unallocated space at the beginning of my second physical HDD (D drive) for Ubuntu installation. I made a FAT32 partition for sharing files with XP if I want to.

However, I have a newer internal Plextor DVD reader/writer (PX-740A) for all optical disk operations (CD's-DVD's). I burnt my Ubuntu install CD from a download. I boot into it fine. But I can't get Ubuntu to proceed past the beginnning of the install where it is going to copy the CD's files from the DVD drive. It verified the integrity of the CD-R itself. Do I need a plain vanilla CD-R drive to install Ubuntu? Do I need space on the C: drive? (that's not part of WinXP)

Should I try another distro?

Also can I install the Linux swap file on unallocated space on a separate physical drive? (C: rather than use part of D)

My computer is a Dell Optiplex GX260 and has a small FAT partition at the beginning of C: where Dell has 'stuff'. Is this going to interfere with installation? [edit 08.20.05: I don't think so, as my live Knoppix CD ran fine with my older CDRW drive]

Thanks for your help with all these newbie questions!

Could you tell us the exact error your getting? or atleast more detail of how it's stoping?

If I took a guess, I would say you need to burn your ISO at a slower speed. I had a similar problem w/ Ubuntu on a friends computer. I burned it at a slower speed and this fixed it. (although you could be having a totally different error but you should always burn your iso's at a slow speed).

What is the exact error you get when trying to copy over the data?

It should work fine, I've installed ok off DVD burner drives (while never that particular brand, I don't see why it shouldn't work).

You can install the swap on any drive you wish, it has to be on unallocated space though (it can be on any drive), and doesn't really have to be all that large. I use 1024 meg for mine (but only cause I tend to follow the guidelines.. twice the size of your RAM). You just have to tell it to put it on that HD's unallocated space/created a partition. Ubuntu's installer is a bit fishy (from what I understand it is based off curses....) You might wanna look at Mandriva's installer or one of the other more gui based ones. Ubuntu is a great distro, and from what I remember their installer is all text.

Same here. My Ubuntu installation kept freezing up at 79% of copying files. Then, I burnt the ISO at 4x, and it worked just fine.

Thanks all for the suggestions. I'm going to reburn the ISO and see what happens with another install. The one with the problem was burned using a CD-RW drive at 24X, not my DVD-RW drive.

on thing you are always going to want to do is check the md5 of your download image. There are some good programs to check that (for windows), just google it, and you can find it.

Sometimes there are a lot of problems when you burn onto cheap cds too quickly. I've run into that many times!

My Ubuntu download file passed a checksum test (thanks for the reminder). My cd blanks are not generic ones. I reburned the file at 12X as a CD like before, not DVD. The drive won't go lower than 12x burning for CD's.

I tried it again. No go. Same as before.

So then I decided to try my copy of live KNOPPIX which had run just fine before I changed the original CDRW drive to the DVD one. It had passed an earlier checksum test.

It wouldn't run this time. It booted and then went on with lots of scrolling over and over which looked like something was failing...

hdc:status error:status 0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
ide:failed opcode was unknown
hdc:drive not ready for command

...then finally stopped at this...

end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 745056
Buffer I/O error on dev hdc, logical block 186264
hdc:drive not ready for command
cloop: read error at pos 37817527 in file /cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX, 34592 bytes lost
cloop: read error -3 uncompressing block 16086
65536/0/34592/0 378317527-378352119
Buffer I/O error in device cloop0, logical block 514778
Bus error /linuxrc: cannot create /var/run/utmp:dir nonexistent
kernel panic - not syncing: VFS:unable to mount root fs on unknown block (1,3)

I guess I need an older CD-rom drive in this machine? Other ideas?

Sounds like that drive is either defective, or just plain not supported. Have you tried booting a windows cd from it, just to make sure it isn't the drive?

Or, does it work all of the time in windows?

The Plextor drive works fine in Windows.

I burned another Ubuntu CD with the older software at 4x and no go.

However, this time from the installer main menu I tried loading individual modules and ended up with a message box with this...

'Unable to load some Modules'
The unavailable modules are ide-mod (Linix IDE driver), ide-probe-mod (Linux IDE probe driver), ide-detect (Linux IDE detector), ide-floppy (linux IDE floppy). It looks like it can't see any of my drives. (?)

Do I need free space on my C drive to start the install? I can make some if so. I wanted to install on my D: drive, and prepped for that. These are physical drives.

Been a discouraging day, tho... Thanks for the ideas.

Well, I got Kubuntu 5.04 installed (I decided I wanted the KDE desktop) after slaving a generic CD-Rom on the controller. So here I am in Linux...

I couldn't figure out at first how to get a boot menu for Windows and then DUH!!! hit ESC and there it was!

So I'm happy again...

Now... to tackle that learning curve...

Thanks everyone