Thanks stress_junkie - I burn with k3b or Nero Linux. I always verify the burn regardless of the source. However the receiving drive will sometimes dislike the CD or DVD even if it verified in the burning drive. The verification routing on the alternate CD was nice as it worked in the target drive. Not yet having the OS installed on the target machine makes running an external verification program a little tedious but thanks or the tip.
Thanks SilverBack - Don;t have any perfume - will sand paper do?
In actual fact - I COPIED the offending CD to another CD in the DVD drive on my desktop PC - where the original CD was created from the ISO file. Booted the server from the copy CD. This time I again got the ""The installer encountered..." error - even though I never got the chance to Try Ubuntu or Install Ubuntu. I let it go to the Live CD Desktop, ran Install Ubuntu, filled in all the custom partition information (lets not go there I have a reason to my madness), user name etc. for the 4th time and took the dog for a walk. When I got back the install was complete. Perhaps I should have gone for a walk the first time - a watched kettle and all.
I am now wondering about upgrading the BIOS. It is at A03 and the current is A10. I took the floppy drive out to cram in another hard drive. I have downloaded the BIOS update from Dell, uncompressed it using a VMWare XP VM, copied it onto a bootable SD card (which contains the diagnostics for my Dell Latitude netbook). I think I can put the SD card in a USB reader and boot the server from that to do the update. What can that hurt?
I am only using the server as a 5 TB NAS. I could simply plug in the drives to my USB connected docking station as I need some backup data. Just like a bunch of 1 TB diskettes!
Ken