I have been working with a variety of linux distributions in the past few days. I am working with 3 desktop systems. Every distribution has the same experience on each machine. It always works on 1 (AMD 2.4) and I have the same problem on the other 2 boxes (an HP 600 celeron and an emachine 500 celeron).

When booting from the CD (Mandrake, Slax, Knoppix) the CD initially is read and a boot sequence begins. All goes well until the system comes back to the CD to begin the installation/boot. With every distro on both of these problem computers as it comes back to the CD there is always some indication that it cannot read the CD. In Mandrake the message is "trying to access cd on CDROM (particular name of that CDROM) included. In slax it just stops and says it is trying to find all available CD's and in Knoppix there is line suggesting it is trying to access the installation CD on the CDROM which is called hdc.

The CD's must be ok since they will work on our homebuilt box. I've tried cheats like "*linux nodma" (Which works for the Knoppix on the emachine, by the way ) "linux noscsi" etc.

This is making me nuts. As I have been checking around the web, I see this is a common situation but there never seems to be an explanation or solution.

What do you think? Can you help me?

* = knoppix, slax or linux depending on the distro I'm using.

Thanks!