I installed a new Mandrake Linux 10.1 Distribution. It seemed to load okay but towards the end of it it gave short shrift time-wise to the 3rd CD. In other words, when it asked for the 3rd CD it loaded it and then spit it right back out and didn't seem to realize it had ever read it. But I ended up with a working Linux OS, including ability to read and burn CDs on my Plextor drive, and broadband internet access.

However, it didn't have a program for playing music, which I was led to believe it should have.

So I went over to Control Center and looked at sound programs, and there were a bunch of them in there with unchecked boxes. In particular I'm after amarok and audacity. When I try to check them I get windows saying I need to load other items, I agree to this, and the boxes get checked. When I try to do an Install, the system tells me to load various CDs from my original distribution, but it spits them out and says I need to insert the very disks I've been trying to insert. So it's not recognizing the original disks of the distro.

I hasten to add that I've checked them against their md5 numbers, and they do check out.

Any ideas of why I can't get the disks recognized? The only thing to add is that when I get tired of this repetitive process, I hit 'cancel' button and I get a small error window saying "There was an error during installation - medium (cdrom 2) is not selected".

I'm not sure what to make of this message. I certainly had the second install disk inserted into the cd player, and the computer certainly was making an effort to read the disk.

Can you mount the CDs manually:
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
ls -l /mnt/cdrom

Or you could setup urpmi to do installs off the internet. Search the forums, you'll find what you need

Thank you for your responses. The problem turned out to be that for some reason during install of 10.1 I ended up with 2 icons for cdroms: /dev/mnt/cdrom and /dev/mnt/cdrom2. The actual device was connected to cdrom2 but the install software was looking for cdrom. Anyhow, I was able to fix this in Config Computer and I'm cooking with gas!

If there is a way to mark this problem 'solved' I'd like to know it.