Mandrake Installation
 

I am trying to install Linux 9.2 from CD onto a Dell Inspiron 3200 Laptop. After the initial screen appears to press F1 and I enter the Linux installation, I recieve an error:

"Can't access a Mandrake Linux Installation disc in your CDROM drive (TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-1702BC). Retry?"

Retrying gives the same message. I'm curious if anyone knows why this is happening and how I might be able to fix this.

Probably you misburnt the CD, try reburning. Or your CD player might have had the best time of it's life. My experience learns that 4 years is about the max a CD player can handle CD's correctly.

Did you check the iso file md5 sums before you burned it to cd?

Also, what speed did you burn it at? Sometimes burning at the max possible speed produces bad results

hi,

if you tried to use an iso-cd, make sure you´ve burnt it in the right manner to a cd. this is what i told someone a few days ago:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...640#post652640


this should help. if not, let me know.


greetz,


bavarian


ps the brave must win--and the brave is red!

same problem with inspiron 3200
 

I happen to be doing the same thing as the first user mentions, installing Mandrake Linux 9.2 on an Inspiron 3200 notebook with Toshiba cd-rom XM-1702BC, and got the same error.

I believe I have burned the cd correctly creating the cd from a hard disk image. Especially since it booted from CD fine, it would seem to have worked right or no? I created it from Windows so do not have the check sum utility one user mention. I actually did get buffer underrun problems so burnt it at half speed.

I checked the Mandrake hardware pages and they don't list this cd-rom. They mention one Toshiba cd-rom as not being supported.

-satans_bear, did you fix your problem?
-Does it seem like a driver problem?
-Is there any hope for the installation to read the cd-rom if Toshiba did not specifically make a driver for Linux or even more specifically for Mandrake?
-Does it seem likely the burning did not go right if I was able to boot from it and start the installation?
-Are there any other suggestions?

Thanks for the help!

Matt

did either of you do an md5sum on the downloaded iso file?

Might be a problem right there. Usually the first thing I check.

Now I actually tried it on my roommates computer and the same CD is fine so I guess I'm assuming it is a driver problem.

Is the best thing to do just search the web for a driver for my cd-rom? If I don't find one, I guess I have to install from a floppy?

what I did was, I copied the cd1 files to the hard drive. Booted from the linux cd-rom and when i received the error just told the installation to read form the harddrive.

The thing is that the CD-ROM doesn't work after the installation. And the CD and the CDROM are both Ok. I can access them from the windows partition.

I did the installation also on a desktop computer to see how to make a linux network work. The thing is that after a while the cd-roms on the desktop have also stop working. I've googled the problem and it seems it's a common one. The only thing is that everybody forgets to paste the final soultion on the web.

Good luck,

Uncas

There's something else that just happened. Some days ago I had a big problem on the Dell because my partition table was erased. The message is in this forum for the solution I used. I could revive the data on my disk without losing a single bit.

For this I used the PAUD disk (paud.sourceforge.net) and i tried booting from this disk again. When I tried mounting the cd it worked fine. AARRRGGGG!!!!!

Well, this says the cd and the cd rom are fine.

Uncas.

New info.....

I observed that, if I use the cdr-rw only it works fine. If by any chance I use the second CDrom it blocks both. Both cdrom are on the same ide controller (ide1). Both Cd's are LG, the thing is that one is two years old and the other is like 6 yo, it's an 8x cdrom. I did the firmware upgrade on the cdr for the problem with mandrake, but I didn't remember that the other cd was manufactured by LG, it's a sound blaster cdrom.

In LG's site doesn't say anything about there being a problem with the old cd and there's no firm upgrade for it.

Just wanted to pass the info.

Uncas

Hi everybody,

I have a dell inspiron 3200, and have the same problem with the mandrake 9.1 and 9.2. I'm sure the CD are fine, for that I have installed on another laptop with no problems.

To further investigate, I have installed a Redhat 9. the installation runs smoothly, but then, the CDROM is not working at all... I had to disabled the DMA (hdparam -d0 /dev/cdrom) and I could mount my CDROM

Could it be somehing like a DMA problem ? I have tried to pass IDE=NODMA at the mandrake boot as a kernel parameter, but it doesn't help...

Any ideas ?