when istalling redhat 7.3 on my compaq presario 915us from the CD-ROM
after 2 screens the installation informs me that :

The Red Hat Linux CD was not found in any of your CDROM drives. Please insert the red hat linux CD and press OK to retry.

any - ideas ?

Probably the copy of the installation media you obtained is corrupted. Try to obtain from other sources.

Ewww Compaq... good luck

Do excuse the cynicism, there is one equipment supplier I have constantly had massive issues with when building linux systems, Compaq takes the cake (and the spit-roast and beer, then vomits in the front yard ).
The amount of problems I have had with compaq desktops... gawd I couldn't even bear to look at trying to build on one of their laptops...

<Takes some deep breaths>

What does the CD use to communicate, pcmcia, usb, ide ??? That's the first thing to find out... you may have to shell out part way through the install and manually insmod some drivers...
You may have some fun coming up with this info from compaq

There are known issues with the compaq 900 series. Check out these pages and see if they help.

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/srv89/presar...900-HOWTO.html
http://www.bisente.com/documentos/pr.../index.en.html

Those sites are specific to the presario 900 series you might also be able to find more information at these.

http://mobilix.org/compaq.html
http://linux-laptop.net

On a positive note, I was able to get slackware 8.1 up and running fairly easily on my 905us so there is hope. Good luck.

this is a link that describes the real problem:

http://diary.codemonkey.org.uk/

in it you will find the following description -

======================


Tuesday 19th November 2002
23:25 :: davej ::

"Laptop from hell (Cont-d)
As Debian had finished installing overnight, I jumped in at the deep end with 2.5.47-ac6 which included Alans fixes for the Presario 900 which sounds like a very similar chipset to that on this laptop, and it all seems to be behaving. IDE only works in PIO mode, haven't had chance to play with sound and graphics, but at least its stable enough to develop on, which is good. This gives me something to play with for Athlon Powernow support"