Install problem: Dell Inspiron 3500 laptop

[John Green]

I've learned a little bit:

Alt-F4 shows the install log (I didn't know that), and the problem is 
with /cdrom/dists/stable/*

If I switch to a console session with Alt-F3, and then look at 
/cdrom/dists, there are the following zero-length files: local, stable, 
testing, and unstable. Those should all be sym-links to dists/warty.

If I view the CD from Windows, of course it looks the same (no 
symlinks), but if I mount the CD from a Linux machine, then those files 
are symlinks, as they should be.

This caused me some confusion when I was checking the MD5SUM for the CD 
under windows - there were 18 files reported missing because Windows 
didn't follow any symlinks. It would be nice to warn users about this, 
somewhere obvious on the disk. When I checked the MD5SUM by mounting the 
CD from the machine booted with Linux, all symlinks were there and all 
MD5SUM checked out OK.

I'm searching the forums with better keywords now, and seeing that 
others had trouble with the same thing on Dell Inspiron laptops. I 
haven't found a resolution yet.

Regards,
John



John Green wrote:
> [Duplicate of: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=60913]
> 
> Summary:
> Are there any special boot arguments (or module parameters) required to 
> install on Dell Inspiron 3500 Laptop?
> 
> Gory details:
> 
> I checked the ISO image MD5SUM, and I also tested the CD against 
> md5sum.txt on the same machine where I'm trying to install Ubuntu. 
> (Machine currently has FC3 installed.) All files on the CD MD5SUM check 
> out OK - the CD and CD drive are fine.
> 
> I can run Ubuntu live, it only requires the boot argument "nodma".
> 
> I have also tried: nodma noscsi noapic nolapic aic7xxx=no_reset
> 
> - Select language, location, keyboard OK
> - Detect and mount CD-ROM OK
> - Unable to load some modules: agpgart, 3c59x, ide-mod, ide-probe-mod, 
> ide-detect, ide-floppy
> - I tried PCMCIA parameter: exclude port 0x800-0x8ff
> - Detect and mount CD-ROM: hdparm to tune CD-ROM drive parameters (I 
> leave blank - I wonder if I need something here?)
> - Scanning CD-ROM - successful
> - "Load installer components from CD": There were problems reading data 
> from the CDROM.
> 
> If I try to "Check the CD-ROM integrity", it doesn't even touch the CD 
> before coming back with a report that the disk is not valid.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> John
> 
>