Trouble installing 7.10

[Bruce Bales]

On Monday 19 November 2007 10:15, D. R. Evans wrote:
> Donn said the following at 11/18/2007 09:20 PM :
> > A few things come to my mind:
> > 1. Bad CD -- Did you check the md5sum and verify the burned iso
> > after you cut it?
> > 2. Is your CD drive poked? (that's busted in South Africanese :)
> > ) 3. Does another CD for some other o/s boot?
> > 4. Then I'd visit the BIOS and see what I can see.
> >
> > So, before you go down the floopy disk road -- and I can't recall
> > the last time I used one! -- give those a whirl.
>
> Also, were you using the regular install CD or the alternative one?
> If you were using the regular one, I would try the alternative one,
> because that one seems to be much better at detecting and handling
> various pieces of hardware.
>
>   Doc
>
> PS I have seen something like what you're seeing (although not when
> using the downloaded CD) if the new system of addressing devices by
> ID instead of name gets somehow mysteriously broken. Was one of the
> error messages saying that it couldn't find your hard drive?

Thanks, Doc.

I tried the CD in a newer machine and it booted and played just right.  

The Dapper CD works just fine in the problem machine.

Can't see anything in the bios.  Floppy is first load device, CD is 
second.  And the CD does load -- at least partially.

The complete series of results is

First, the Kubuntu logo and a list of "Install, Run, Check CD, etc."  
I pick one and get a message that shows for one second that 
contains " ... acpi fails ...."
next I see:
busybox v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-5ubuntu7) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs) [  97.620409] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 
0x0 action 0x2 frozen
[  97.620490] ata1.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00:/00:00:00:00:00:/e0 tag 0 
cdb 0x12 data 4096 in
[  130.140619] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 
0x2 frozen
[  130.140619] ata1.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00:/00:00:00:00:00:/e0 tag 
0 cdb 0x12 data 4096 in

[  195.181153] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 
0x2 frozen
[  195.181153] ata1.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00:/00:00:00:00:00:/e0 tag 
0 cdb 0x12 data 4096 in

(initramfs)

"help" brings a list like
. : alias break cd chdir command continue    etc.

NOTE:
Opening the CD under Dapper, one file on the CD is named README.sbm 
and contains the following:

About the Smart Boot Manager image

  The file `sbm.bin' that is available in this directory may be useful
  to you if you are not able to directly boot the first CD because 
your BIOS may be too old and may not support ISOLINUX.

  Then, instead of booting on the CD directly, you create a Smart Boot
  Manager floppy image by using the sbm.bin disk image. You can create 
this floppy with rawrite (under DOS) or with dd (under Linux). Now 
you can  boot on this floppy disk and it will detect your CDROM and 
let you boot  on it bypassing any BIOS limitation.

What is SBM ?

  Smart Boot Manager or briefly SmartBtmgr (SBM), is an OS independent
  Boot Manager - a program that is loaded by the bios before any
  operating system and allows you to choose which operating system to
  boot.

  SBM is included in Debian in two ways, the package bmconf allows us 
to  install and configure an old version of SBM and sbm wich is the 
latest  version of SBM with an installer.

What's the use of SBM on the CD then ?

What's the use of SBM on the CD then ?

  SBM includes an IDE driver that allows us to boot the cds even on
  machines with a BIOS that wouldn't support booting from CD, provided 
our  CDROM is an IDE one, that is, so you can make a SBM floppy and 
boot from  it and then tell it to boot from your CDROM.

  Also, there are some cases where the BIOS would allow booting from 
the CD  but isolinux fails to boot from there, in this case you can 
either boot  using a CD other than the first, as the others don't use 
isolinux, or you  can make a SBM floppy and boot from this floppy and 
then tell SBM to boot  your CDROM.

How do you make a SBM floppy ?

  If you have SBM installed on a box you can run sbminst. Otherwise 
you can  put the sbm.bin floppy image that we provide with our cds 
onto a floppy  just like you would do with a rescue image.
(END)                                                  

That last paragraph made me think I could install sbm on the machine 
and sbminst would make a floppy boot disk.  It did write something on 
the floppy, but the results were just the same (except it takes 
longer).

COMMENT:
I have been using Linux for eight years; exclusively for six or seven 
years.  I have installed various versions and distributions perhaps 
30 times.  I greatly appreciate what the developers have provided me.  
There have been great improvements in these years.  Kubuntu is by far 
the best.  Would I give this CD to a typical Windows user and let him 
install it?  Hardly.
bruce