I'm trying to install fedora 5 on and older pc it's a custom built P3with an A-bit mother board it's an old dvd rom one of the first ones made and a plexwriter burner.

I download fedora 5 three iso's and burned them with the plexwriter, swaped hard drives and set to boot from D: drive

It has a hard time booting from the dvd rom but after 4 or 5 trys it will boot to fedora and I get through the first disk and when I put the sencond disk in it can't read it... Now I would have thought a bad disk or a crupt file but it did the exact same thing when I tryed to install Slack and I used differanrt disks. If I put a Windows disk in (God forbid) the dvd rom reads it fine (the windows disk was not burned on my plexwriter)
It has a option in the bios to boot from E: but it flat wont do that at all.

Thanks for your help!

First, support for FC5 will be dropped on June 30. Fedora 7 was released yesterday.

I would guess you need to update the drive. A lot of the early drives would only recognize certain disk types(rom only or only -r, etc). I have swapped drive just to do an install before. It is kind of lame but if it gets the job done. Did you check the sha1sum of the ISOs before you burned them?

First thing to do is check the MD5SUM's for the iso files you downloaded. That will tell you whether they are OK. Search for MD5SUM here on LQ for how to do that. Did you do this in Windows or another Linux box?

The second thing is that if the cd drive in the box is old, you may have to write the cd's at a lower speed. The continuous hunting sounds like it might be that. Try 12x.

The third possibility is again an age thing, in that the lens for the laser may have deteriorated. They can distort with heat cycling, so the beam goes out of focus.

I've had all three of these problems at one time or another. The first two are easy to fix though time consuming, the third needs a replacement drive.

Thanks for your help! I think it don't like those -rw disks. I remember having a like problem a few years ago.... I'm thinking my BIOS is set to auto detect. if I just remove the d: drive then it should asign the plexwriter as d: drive instead of e: does that make since? it wrote it ... it should read it. When you said support will end for FC5 after june 30th what exactly does that mean?