I just tried to boot a Gentoo 64 live CD, and it looked for my CDrom drive on /dev/'s hda, hda1, hda2, and hda3, before crashing. No error messages. The weird thing is that that happened a few seconds after I rebooted, and I have booted the cd and the image hundreds of times before. What's going on?

Thanks,
-Peter

There are two possibilities that I can immediately think of: (1) your hardware is dying; and (2) something got messed-up in BIOS.

First try going into your BIOS config and making sure that the CDROM settings are correct. If it's supposed to be /dev/hdb, for example, make sure that BIOS is seeing your CDROM as the Primary Slave. hda and hdc are masters, while hdb and hdd are slaves.

If that doesn't work, try replacing the drive with another one (if you have another one available).

Can you access it from Windows? Can you boot a Knoppix CD?

Hope that helps.

--Dane

I'm running windows, and the drive works fine. I didn't change the bios either. The CD boots, but it doesn't actually get past the cdrom drive. It's weird. I literally booted from the CD 5 minutes before the first time it didn't work. The hardware is also 6 months old, so I doubt that it's that.

Thanks,
-Peter

Have you tried cleaning the CD? The disc that is -- gently & radially. Dirt can cause a CD that used to work to boot & then fail.

Alternatively, you may have to re-burn from the ISO.

I burnt it on an RW because I kept loosing my original cd. I'll probably just reburn it.

Thanks,
-Peter

If you don't mind the time to re-burn, a good way to avoid the clutter & expense of multiple dead ROM's.

BTW, I am given to understand that RW's are even more prone to "bit rot" than ROM's.

I think my computer was just being stupid. I booted and after a few seconds of playing with the hard drive it managed to find /dev/hdc. Sorry for the false alarm. I appreciate the help anyway.

Thanks,
-Peter

No problem.

Thanks for letting us know the outcome.

Your welcome: I hate when people hoard solutions to problems...

-Peter