Still not installing on my laptop, odd discovery about missing links...

[Neil Woolford]

Hi,

My regular post every few weeks is about not being able to get Ubuntu to 
install on my
Dell Inspiron 7500.  I'd love to have Ubuntu on the machine, so I keep 
returning to the
problem and delving a little further into it.

The main symptom is that the install stops immediately after the package 
scan has
completed (successfully).  If I switch to a console at this point I see two 
things:

Firstly; the system has failed to make dma work with the CD drive, and has 
disabled it.
This appears to be correct as the package scan then takes place.

Secondly;  the package loading stage should start, but instead things grind 
to a halt
in a loop.  The process anna (the package loader) repeatedly gives the 
error message:
/cdrom/dists/stable/Release : Not a directory.

What is interesting about this is that /dists/stable on the CD (final 
published Ubuntu
'official' disk) is actually a link to /dists/warty/.  Putting it another 
way, the file Release
exists in ..../warty/ not ..../stable and the system should find it via the 
link from /stable
to /warty/.

However, when I list /cdrom/dists/stable with the -l option it is *not a 
link*.  Hence the
error message from anna which can't find Release as the path to it includes 
a normal
filename not the link to the directory.

If I inspect the distribution CD on my desktop system  I find that the file 
/dists/stable *is*
a link to /dists/warty/ as it should be.

It therefore appears that for some reason during install the filesystem is 
not recognising
symbolic links on the CD, although they do appear elsewhere in the install 
system's files.
What could be causing the CD to mount in such a way?  How can I stop it 
happening?

Neil
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