Installation problem/Newbie how-to

[Jason Kolpack]

I tried installing Ubuntu tonight for the first time, and ran into some 
problems.  The error has already been addressed, and I found the error 
in Ubuntu Traffic #3:

> Jeff Waugh Install On His New Laptop
>
> Jeff Waugh did an install onto his laptop: a Dell X300, very Centrino 
> but with a Broadcom (tg3) wired NIC and a CD-ROM attached via the 
> 'mediabase' base station:
>
> 	1.  	Language = English
> 	2.  	Country = Australia
> 	3.  	Big red background, "Detect and mount CD-ROM: An installation 
> step  failed." Hitting continue drops me back to the installer main 
> menu, so I  try that step again. It dives straight into the next step, 
> loading the  installer components as if nothing happened! Wacky. 
> Colin's gone to bed,  but I can run through this again with live 
> coverage. :-)
> 	4.  	Network autodetection ran fine, it correctly chose the tg3 
> driver for my  Broadcom wired NIC.
> 	5.  	Disk partitioning, manual because I want to have a separate 
> /home.
> 	6.  	Big red background, "Copy packages to hard disk: An installation 
> step  failed." Trying this again did not work.
> 	7.  	Chose to install the base system from the main menu, 
> "Debootstrap Error:  Failed getting Release file 
> /cdrom/dists//Release." Weird, it doesn't  know the release name.
>
> Matt Zimmerman replied saying, "I have a strong hunch that it's 
> related to hdparm. Edit /var/lib/dpkg/info/cdrom-detect.postinst, 
> comment out the hdparm stuff, and retry."  Jeff Waugh followed up 
> with, "Hey hey hey, good hunch! No initial error... Loads the 
> installer components straight off... Copying packages to disk! 
> Hooray!"  A bug was filed for removal of the offending code.

I had this exact same problem, even the initial error in step 3.  
Problem is, I'm afraid that I don't know how to follow the directions 
that Matt gave to fix the problem.  Can someone explain to me how to go 
about this fix?

Jason