i think i broke my mobo
 

Well, I have been having problems installing an OS to my computer. Every nix distro has given me errors. Most errors involve not being able to copy a file during the installation. Windoze messes up too...

Well, I loaded SuSE 9 onto a hard drive on my secondary computer, and then put it on my primary computer (the one with problems). Swapped the drives, basically. It installs fine, and then the computer runs fine (as fine as it can, its still kind of messed up because its configured for another system...).

Anyway, I guess my question is, could this be a problem with my motherboard? Maybe data isn't going from my cdrom to HDD properly? I know the HDD functions, and that the CDROM functions fine, I used them on my secondary comp with success.

Could something be wrong with my hard drive, ribbon cables? My computer fell off of a table a while ago.

Sorry if this isn't coherent, cold medication...

sounds primitive, but open that sucker up and make sure all the connections are tight, etc.

also, is there a common point of error when installing? because it could just be a faulty burned ISO to blame

Yeah, everythings tight. One (unused) jumper is bent but the actual connection is still solid. Maybe theres some other damage though...I guess I could open it and make sure all solder connections are still good.

Oh, and its a commercial disk. I thought my cdr-rom might be broken so I bought suse...

Do you have another Linux machine around that you can copy the CDs to then run an FTP install over the network? I had a problem with one of my machine's CDROM drives (probably cooked it by having two 10,000 RPM drives below it with out proper cooling), I needed to rebuild the machine. Created boot and driver floppies and exported the directory with the RPMs and all went well.

God, I hate to think that my dvd-r rom is broken. But both of my rom drives are having the problem, so I really don't think that's it.