DVD-R drive not recognised by Ubuntu installer
 

Reviews have convinced me Ubuntu would be a good newbie linux distro.

Everything was going swimmingly with the install - the CD booted, then I setup the configuration options but when it came to hardware recognition my DVD-R drive doesn't get recognised (LG GSA-4120B)

It offers me a choice to install a custom driver from a floppy or select from a list of possible drivers of which I tried every option to no avail (either didn't work or the installer hung)

A quick google presented me with a list of commands which are no use because I can't access a command prompt so I'm left at a loose end - is my super-duper multi-everything drive too confusing for Ubuntu to see as a simple CD drive?

iirc ubuntu is based on debian. maybe they have taken the installer too. so you eventually can get a console by switching to vt2 at the install menu with alt+f2 and press enter for a console.

since it's just a dvd you could also skip that since there normaly is no need for a special driver for those things - in 2.6 kernels the ata driver and in 2.4 ide-scsi will take care of that.

sl mritch.

Thanks mritch,

Guess I didn't it very clear - the main problem is if I skip recognising the drive it cannot read from it at all (even as a CD) and the install fails...

I'll try accessing the console tonight though and see if there's a way to fix it there.

Cheers!

This might have to do with the way SATA and PATA are set up in your system. It happened to me too, until I set SATA mode to 'enhanced' instead of 'compatible'. It seems that in 'compatible' mode my SATA disk was obsouring the PATA drives, or some such.

Too bad that 'enhanced' mode made my system unable to run my previous installation of Mandrake 10.

Too bad, also, that a bit later, when installing grub, the installer insisted on writing to (hd0), which does not exist at all in my system (the SATA hard disk is 'sda'). This is a reported bug, so it might me fixed soon; meanwhile, the computer freezes at that stage.

I tried to skip Grub and go with lilo, which sort of worked: lilo was indeed installed in the proper drive (wiping the previous lilo), and installation proceeded a bit further until it stalled again.

I tried installing in my portable, however, and everything went fine. It is a very nice system (though it CAN get better). I will keep on using it, for now.

Cheers!

Nacho.