Ok, I failed the media test. Now what? I've thought about buying the discs and giving back to the linux community, but I need to get this installed as soon as possible. How do I download it and make sure it doesn't have errors. And yes, I did make sure the discs were clean.

Where did you download from? I've downloaded from www.linuxiso.org without any issues...You could also try www.distrowatch.com - I haven't tried it, but I hear that it's good.

Do you check the checksum on your ISO's when you download em? Might be a good idea as well so that way you aren't in the middle of installation and a disk is bad or something.

I just realized that it is possible that I forgot to close the disc. I used Nero to burn it and I can't find anywhere in it's documentation if I have it set to automatically close the disc or not. I don't remember being asked to close the disc though. I tried puting a song on disc 4(since it only has about 250mb of data on it) to see if it said the disc has already been closed or if there isn't room, but it said "The medium is not empty", whatever that means. Anyone know how I can figure out if I closed the disc?

Usual error when media was written with high speed.
Be sure that you burn you install media with lower speed. 24x MAXIMUM!!

Wow, really? I burned it at 48x! I burned another disc back in november that had a version of nopix on it and I'm pretty sure I burned it at 48x but it works fine.
Hmmm, I'll do that in the future, but I still need to know how to see if I closed the disc.
BTW, nice name!

Knoppix as other LiveCDs is not installation media. On CD packages already unpacked and ready to use. It's on CD OS

Hope you got your problem solved.

I'm having a similar problem. I have been burning Core 3 on a Windows box using Cheetah (it worked fine the last time on same box), burning at 4X; have burned on CD-R's from Fuji, Autobahn (cheap), and Imation (worked great on Core 2). All boot up and fail media check. I've quit burning disk 2 to make sure disk 1 succeeds. It hasn't. My distribution came directly from fedora.redhat.com. They all MD5 check fine.

What do I need to do? Buy some gold plated CD's, go to another mirror site?

Cheetah gives a message saying it is "closing disk."

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

I'd try another mirror, or not even use a mirror at all, just download it from the fedora website. It sounds like you've eliminated every other possibility for what could be going wrong. If that doesn't work, I'd try using a different burning software.

The same is happenign with me, I downloaded FC3 as a torrent hoping to help out and not kill red hats bandwith. I burned it on an old 4x drive and the wierd thing is that it works fine on all of my computers besides the one im trying to install on. Every other computer passes the media check but the one i want to intall on fails. I tried another CDROM drive, but to no avail. I also swiched IDE cables, what could be wrong?

Thanks,
Petes

Turns out the disk works fine - i dont know if the test is really that accurate.

I also have the same problem. I tried to install FC3 on laptop Toshiba Tecra S1, and the media test failed for all my FC3 CDs (but I didn't bother to download the rescue CD so I don't know if it'd fail the test too). I checked the md5sum from all the CDs and they are correct. (I downloaded CD1&2 from a mirror and CD3&4 from another mirror). I also used Nero Burning Rom at speed 24X, and tried both closing it and leaving it open after burning. Nothing made the CDs pass the media test.

So I had the guts to install with these CDs anyway. The installation went smoothly, but now experienced some problems when I use it, which I 'm trying to solve. But can't be sure if these problems are caused by the CDs, though I suspect not. As alwasys, I'm now just trying to look on the net if other people have experienced the same problems.

The media test for Fedora isn't very reliable... Ive ran the media test tons of times and it said a disc fails but it installs fine w/0 problems.

yea, I'm about to the point of doing that. I really want fedora up and running ASAP. What is the extent of the possible damage if the media check really was right?

the possible damage is the install wont work so you just wouldnt be able to use that fedora install until u like reformat it or reinstall it... no real damage really just gotta reburn

Booting up on FC2 disk 1 showed there is a flaw in FC3. Run media check from there. Only Disk 2 was bad not 3, and the rescue disk.