Linux Install not seeing the CD drive

[AirBaker]

So amongst the tinkering I've been trying to load Redhat, Fedora, SUSE (not all at the same time) on my current machine. All the installs seem to get hung up before getting to far. If I do a text install, it hangs after loading the IDE drivers. In the graphical install, it just asks for the CD repetitively. (Even though its in the drive and that's how it booted up anyways). I can get more technical if there are any linux guru types out here.

 

[wsuffa]

So amongst the tinkering I've been trying to load Redhat, Fedora, SUSE (not all at the same time) on my current machine. All the installs seem to get hung up before getting to far. If I do a text install, it hangs after loading the IDE drivers. In the graphical install, it just asks for the CD repetitively. (Even though its in the drive and that's how it booted up anyways). I can get more technical if there are any linux guru types out here.

How old is the machine?

I had an issue loading FreeBSD on a machine with an old CD Rom drive. Something in the boot sector didn't like the drive. Same symptoms. My solution was to boot from a floppy, then load the OS from the CDROM. Everything worked fine after that....

 

[AirBaker]

Its only a 1-1.5 years old I think. I'll have to find a floppy drive to throw on in for that solution. Might just work though!

 

[jesse]

It might be something with the installer.. All of those distributions you mentioned use a simliar installer and are based on Andaconda.

Honestly the most user friendly linux distribution out there right now is:
http://www.ubuntu.com/

I use it for workstations and just switched our company servers from Windows Server 2003 to the Ubuntu server edition. (I actually use Linux with Samba to act as a Windows domain controller)

 

[mantakos]

Do you have SATA drives in the system?

I vaguely recall having similar trouble getting Debian to recognize my CD-ROM (IDE drive on an SATA system). There were SATA controller BIOS settings that eventually made it happy.

By the way, you'd be surprised how effective Google is as a troubleshooting manual. You can almost always find somebody else who posted a similar problem, and eventually learned the solution.
-harry

 

[AirBaker]

There are SATA drives, but they're on a RAID controller. I'll look and see if the onboard SATA controller is still enabled. Meanwhile I've got SUSE installed on another machine. I'll probably give a network install a shot.

 

[mikea]

There are SATA drives, but they're on a RAID controller. I'll look and see if the onboard SATA controller is still enabled. Meanwhile I've got SUSE installed on another machine. I'll probably give a network install a shot.

If it's like mine, the Nvidia RAID on the motherboard only happens when a Windows driver is loaded to provide all of the smarts for it.

But the CD drive is on a conventional ATA/IDE bus as far I know.