I'm trying to install Mandrake 9 from the CDs I made from downloaded ISOs onto my dusty old machine :

Intel P120+ 100MHz
65536 K
2 Gb HD
24x CD-Rom (an AOpen CD-924E/AKO)

I created a bootdisk with rawrite. When I boot from it I see the 'F1 for options or Enter to install' screen just fine so I hit Enter, which gives me a black screen with Welcome to Mandrake Linux (9.0) at the top, followed by

Please wait ... Trying to access Mandrake Linux CDROM disc (drive CD-ROM 24X/AKO)

and then nothing else. Pressing Alt-F4 to get to the kernel msg tells me :

<4>hdd: lost interrupt
<4>hdd: cdrom_pc_intr: The drive appears confused
(ireason = 0x 1)

Any guesses ?

Big up the Linux massive !

Welcome to LQ.

Can you not set your computer to boot from the CDrom in the bios settings?

Um ... no. The BIOS is password protected and I don't have the password. I rescued the PC from a skip.

Maybe I can get round that by depowering the BIOS.

I can get the back off the PC though, and rewire the cables from the CD-Rom if that's any use ?

There are a number of different ways that you could install Linux onto this machine, and only 1 requires the CD drive. If the machine has a network card then you could install it over a network...? I would suggest that at some point you reset the BIOS, though.

Thanks for your help but I have no network card (yet! must do some more skip diving...)

OK, the BIOS password is no more. Thank you for your help Thymox !

You may still get these errors - it looked more like the CD drive was knackered which is why I was hinting at alternative installation methods. If you can't wait, then may I suggest that you power down your current machine, whip out your cd drive, plug it into your 'new' machine and let rip, then when you're done installing, put the cd drive back in your current machine.