Mandrake 10 Installation fails to read CDROM
 

:( I downloaded and burned Mandrake Community 10 to some CD's and tried to install.

I'm booting the system via a floppy disk (created using the "rawwritewin.exe"). It works fine to boot the system but when it tries to read the CD rom, it says "that CDROM doesn't seem to be a Mandrake Linux Installation CDROM." This has happend with my download of v9.2 as well and I thought I had a bad download with that one but it happening with 10 as well.

I am so new to Linux (any flavor) that I may as well be touching a computer for the first time with it. I'm good at windows stuff though. :) So, if you have an explanation, the best help would be the most explanitory. I know that is a lot to ask for but I'd really like to get away from Windows if possible...

What am I doing wrong/missing with this installation?

Remember this is a public "beta" and thus it has bugs. This apparently is one of them... I read in another forum boot from the second CD and then when it asks you insert the first..

Sorry, that didn't work either...

This was happening with my 9.2 as well as the 10. Is 9.2 a beta as well?

DId you check the integrity of your downloads with md5?

If you dont know how, google for somthing like "how to md5 checksum"

No 9.2 is a final release. Do you by any chance have 2 cd drives (cd-rom/cd-r/rw)? I've had to (dunno why) place a CD in both of the drives so one gets read.

Another thing, you do not need to boot from cdrom you can also boot from floppy. if you insert the MDK cd while on windows it gives you the option to create a boot disk, just select the floppy image and boot from that.

Yep, I have been booting from the floppy and it boots just fine with that method. The problem comes into play after it's been booted, it doesn't recognize the CDROM after that point. That's a good suggestion though to try a CD in both CDROMS. I'll try that and see how it goes.

Here's a additional question; is Mandrake a "good enough" OS to be going through all this trouble for or, is there a differenct flavor of Linux out there that is easier for a newbie, such as myself, to use and become familiar with?

I guess I'm open for all suggestions...

Thanks again for the help...

Redhat/Fedora is also a good distribution for us newbs. Installed easily, although I had sound issues with Fedora so I switched to Mandrake 10.0 I also felt Fedora's installation was better as it had all the options on initial install, with Mandrake I had to install everything once I got the OS loaded (maybe I missed something on initial install) Mandrake 10 uses the 2.6 based kernel and I believe Fedora (current version) uses the 2.4 kernel. I attempted updating to the 2.6 kernel in Fedora, but I still couldn't get sound to work properly.