OT: Building a Computer, Unable to read from disk during install (Ubuntu)

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 21:33 -0700, Mike Hoy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Just built a new computer and having some minor problems. First time
> building one so I'm not surprised that something went wrong. It boots
> up to cmos fine and shows a dvd rom and a hdd. So I install Ubuntu and
> it says 'unable to read from disk' even though the installer started
> up and everything. I chose 'Install Ubuntu'. Tried a knoppix cd and
> got a similar error, it dropped me to a basic shell and did nothing
> after that. I rebooted and went into CMOS and it shows no
> Master/Slaver selected. How do you do that? I don't see any jumpers to
> set. I remember having to set jumpers a long time ago when I actually
> did some work on hardware. Any suggestions as to what might be causing
> this?
----
assuming PATA (or otherwise known as IDE/ATA) which is surely typical of
the majority of DVD drives, there should be a jumper set to CS (cable
select) on any reasonably modern motherboard because the cable will
determine which is master (the end) or the slave (the middle)

The hard drive might very well be SATA which would not have any type of
cable select or master/slave type of designations at all.

I know on Fedora anaconda installer, you can press <Control><Alt><F3>
(or F4) which shows standard out (F3), error out (F4) and a command
prompt (F2) where you could actually type commands like 'lspci -v' that
could tell you a lot about your motherboard/connections.

Craig