Mandrake 8.1 CDs?

[Cooter]

I bought a boxed distro of Mandrake 8.1 a month or so back and it's been nothing but hell. The tech support was very unstaisfactory.
However, my quest to figure out whats up has led me to a few theories. (Yea,we know what theories are - BS) It seems as if some users have no problems and some can't even get it off the ground. I have seen several threads that say the problem is the CDRoms used to load it. It will load fine on one machine and not another. The inevitable always ends up "Well,the cdrom works fine in Windows". Could this be the different drivers that different brands use? I've installed this distro 14 times and kept a log of what's wrong with each one. The fewer packages you load on startup the better the installation. The last install I loaded bare bones and now install everything by hand and the errors are way down and the system is solid.
I'm starting to lean towards the theory that the cd works better on certain brands of CDRoms tan others. Could this be possible?

[JimH]

I'm starting to lean towards the theory that the cd works better on certain brands of CDRoms tan others. Could this be possible?

Yes, it is possible the cdrom is "bad". Lets face the facts that there is a lot of inferior quality hardware around.

A lot of the times it can just be the specific combination of hardware. Some hardware just does not play well together.

Jim H

P.S. Winmodems also "work in windoze", but that doesn't mean they are "good". :P :

[Cooter]

Yes,just because a cdrom shows to be "supported" doesn't mean it will actually work. I created a partition and copied my CDs to it and rebuilt any programs that were giving "error messages". Life is good.