No Joy with CD or DVD install,where's that hammer?

[Pet-240]

Hey Folks, new here, have been reading the other forums and am not getting the answers to my questions,
I have an Acer Laptop, prob bout 6-8 yrs old,specs as follows;

Pentium 4 1.7 GHz processor,
2Gb RAM
160Gb HDD (IDE)
ATi Mobility Radeon Graphics
Nothin else very excitin about it,

What I want to do, am wanting to put together a HTPC and am looking at different packages to provide what I like and I saw the video for MCE and thought that with further dev it will be the best I've seen, my problem is thus, I can get the Live CD to work in either Ubuntu 8.04lts which I was tryin to load Entertainer on, then found MCE and have burnt the Live CD for Kubuntu 07.10 which loads fine, however whenever I try to load the MCE from CD I can see the mce installer.deb file and the deb cache folder but it will not a; auto load as the site says or b; will not load with a package installer, ARK bings up an error message, one thing I noticed in the system was that the CD/DVD drive wasn't mounting, had to enable it yet it had loaded the os from it? Anyway I tried extracting the files and loading to no joy, the md5sums are ok, but it will not load, I downloaded the DVD LinuxMCE-DVD-i386-rc2 and burnt it with ISOBurner in Windows as my other software wouldn't let me do it unless I converted to a UDF file, which I have no idea about. Just to clarify, Kubuntu and MCE are the only operating sytems on the PC. The PC then wouldn't boot from the dvd nor will it bring it up on the desktop when it is put in with Kubuntu running.
Just tried the cd again to get the package error to put here and noticed that when I open the cd from the desktop, I have the two files, one being deb-cache and the other is mce-installer_2.0.1-1_i386.deb, when I click on properties it tells me that this file is 4.8MB though when I look at the right hand side of the screen with the mouse over the mce.deb type is a debian package but size is 0 B. I'm confused, what am I missing? If I click to install there is no description on the package installer page though there is file names in the included files section, should I allow the OS to update itself then try again? The OS hasn't been modded, not even the date format!!!

Please advise as I'd like to play with this and I don't want to buy hardware until I know which way I'm going,I'm going to download off a different mirror the first cd and see if that helps.

Would appreciate the advice!!!

[Pet-240]

just tried to eject the cd from the desktop and it's telling me that the cdrom cant be unmounted, device system:/media/scd0(/dev/scdo) named 'CDROM' mounted at /media/cdrom0 could not be unmounted due the following error: Cannot open /media/.hal-mtab
menu bar says- Error - kio_media_mounthelper

Any Thoughts please?

[merkur2k]

I am not really sure whats up with the cd install, its been a very long time since ive done it and I much prefer the dvd install. I suspect that whatever software you were using to burn the dvd image ended up creating a dvd with the iso file on it, rather than actually using it as an image.
I know i used CDBurnerXP to burn it (theres a specific option for making a disc from an image), which is free.

[colinjones]

Download and install PowerISO and burn the DVD with that at the slowest speed (after checking the dvd iso's md5sum first, of course)

[Pet-240]

So it shouldn't matter that it is the single layer dvd as none of the dl mirrors would run? Will try the two options mentioned and get back to you.
 Thanks......

[colinjones]

Don't bother with the DL iso's they are generally for upgrading existing systems and other purposes. The single layer is fine.

[tschak909]

they dlso have high resolution versions of the demo video.

-thom

[Pet-240]

I tell you that hammer is starting to look real good!!!!!

Tried CDburnerXP- no joy
Tried PowerISO- no joy
did notice it takes forever to boot as well, thought linux was fast at this?
Can see separate folders and stuff in the burn compilation, but just not feelin any love when i try to run them.

am gettin very frustrated!!!!

Just dont make sense that i could burn iso's of both os' and they work but neither cd nor dvd will run. Will try burning the cd with PowerIso and see how that goes. Could it be a bios thing?

[Pet-240]

Could it be somethin silly with a driver for the DVD drive? And yes I checked, it IS a DVD/CD-RW drive!!!

Guess it is also an Acer.....

Will avoid the hammer and keep it as stress relief.....maybe.

Please advise, Thanks.

[tschak909]

is your computer's BIOS set to allow booting from CD ROM?

-Thom

[Pet-240]

it is the first on the list, however there is no plus sign next to it as there is with the floppy and the hard drive. dunno whether that matters or not.

[tschak909]

you might wanna try to put a + sign there.

-Thom

[Pet-240]

Just figured out that the + designates that it is expandable i.e. it shows the hard drive type and the floppy type but not the dvd/cd type, which is strange. even if I force it to boot from cd withthe "c" button on start up it seems to run the disk a couple of times and then go to hard drive boot, which takes a couple of minutes,is there an easy way of formatting the hard drive totally so it "has" to look at the disk?

[colinjones]

Have you got a "real" retail bootable disk like a Windows disk that you can stick in there to see if you have the right settings or there is an issue with the disk you burned?

[Pet-240]

Yes, but first i'm gonna try to re-burn the cd's using PowerISO and see if that works, after that I have an XP disk I can use, was reading other forums last night and read one about a guy who to this day cannot boot off the DVD and he doesn't know why, so the PC sees the cd, it just hasn't auto loaded as per the wiki, can see where you are coming from Colin, will try that in a bit and let you know, Cheers muchly!!