[hdcdubee]

Hello,
I've been attempting to install Fedora 3 onto my laptop for the past 2 days. I"ve installed RedHat 9 on it before a while ago but then I wasn't sure if I wanted to use a Linux distro or if I wanted to install Windows. Since macro$oft is a money grubbing corp and I can't install it on several computers, I had to find a more economical solution to my problem.
I contacted Redhat and let them know that I was a student and that I deleted windows when I installed RedHat and I wasn't ready to make a choice like that. She immediately directed me towards Fedora3 and let me know that it came with a office suite that is compatible with microsoft word, power point, and excel. That's huge for me since I other windows computers in my possession as it is.
I downloaded the 4 iso images from their server and I wrote those images onto blank discs with burnatonce. I put the cd into the cd-rom and changed the bios to boot from the cd-rom. Everything at first seemed to run seamlessly until after pressing <enter> at the boot screen. After this it would say <running install> then something about </sbi/bin/loading> or something like that. It would then sit there for more than an hour just doing nothing. A prompt would then come up asking for the language on the install and the type of keyboard being used. After I pressed <enter> on both of those, A blue screen with Welcome to Fedore Core would appear, but it would be blank. It would have on the bottom of that blue screen: <Tab><Alt-Tab> between elements : <Space> selects : <F12> next screen. It would then sit there with this blank screen for more than an hour also. After a while a gray pop-up would appear saying CD not found saying, "The Fedora Core CD was not found in any of your CDROM drives. Please insert the Fedora Core CD and press OK to retry." With an <OK> and <BACK> buttons.
I tried to take out the cd and put it back in but it just does the same thing. Should I take the bay out and re-insert it? I'm not sure what to do at this point and this is really starting to become aggrivating because when I installed RedHat before it didn't give me these types of problems. Also, why is it taking so long in between different tasks?
Thanks for the help.
-dubee

[horndude]

http://www.tuxmobil.org

go there and see if you can find someone else experience with your same kind of laptop, laptops often have all kinds or very rare hardware as far as linux goes, some of the older ones from IBM rely on DOS for cdrom drivers and hotswapping drives for example.

it sounds like your having problems with your drive reading the disks, some drives dont like reading cdr's, it happens sometimes, may have to reburn them or reburn them onto a different brand of cdr too, its rare, but sometimes that can make a difference, do the burns slowly too, old audio players have huge problems with cdr's, slow burning them helps, may help you in this case, other than that ive no clue what to tell you

[hdcdubee]

Aiight, well I've burned another copy at a slower rate and I've still had the same result. Does the cd type really play a role? Should I try burning them onto CD-RW's? Or should I try another type of CD-R completely?
Thanks ahead of time.
-Dubee

[horndude]

dont know for sure, I do know that ive got 3 cdrom drives that will not read cdr's at all, they are a few years old, they wont read cdrw's either

On rare occasions changing brands of cdr's will help, but it isnt likely that it will.

Sounds like its a fairly old laptop and it just doesnt want to read those disks, there's another guy here on TF that had the same issues, only his spit out lots of errors instead of just freezing, some drives will get caught trying to re-read data and get stuck in a loop, others will retry a few times then give up.

If youve still got the redhat disks, install that, redhat 9 isnt that old, it will work just fine

[hdcdubee]

Alright. I'm going to try to one more option. I was just surprised on how it worked for RedHat but not for Fedora on the same laptop.
I have one more option. My mom just got a laptop with a DVD burner on it. I'm going to download the dvd and burn it on one CD. Maybe that'll work but I'm not sure because I have to make sure that it's able to read DVD's, but at this point I'm willing to practically try anything. I'm even thinking about just buying another laptop.
I'll keep you guys posted!
Thanks for all the help.
-dubee