Topic: E-smith CD Not recognized

[Mike Coan]

I have downloaded the e-smith iso image and burned in on a CD using Adaptec Creator on a Windows PC.  I have used this CD to install e-smith on 3 machines, all of which are new machines.  Everything went fine.

Now I am installing e-smith on an old machine (Pentium 75 Mhz) for a small nonprofit office (10 users).  The machine's bios does allow booting from the CD-ROM (an ATAPI) device.  On startup the machine reads the CD-ROM, says failure, and then boots from the hard drive.  After it has booted Windows and I try to read the CD, it says device not ready.

Not really an e-smith question, but I don't understand why the older machine can't seem to read this Cd, when other machines with Windows already installed could read it fine.

Any ideas?

Mike

[Dan Brown]

Sounds like the CD-ROM drive can't read burned CDs.  I ran into this problem about a month ago on an older machine.

[Adam Scott]

I have this failure to read a home-burned cd too on old machines; think it is just that older cd drives cannot read such new disks (weaker lasers or disks not as reflective as commercially produced ones?). Simply swapping the drive for a newer one seems to solve problem ... or else installing across a network from a machine whose drive does read the disk (but e-smith not happy with network installs?)

[ed sharpe archivist for]

Had a problem like this also...

the older drives really HATE rewritable cd media! I think I solved this by using CDR instead of CDRW media.

What type of Media did you do the burn on?

With the newer faster drives that are really cheap now an upgrade would  be a blessing  when loading a whole disto from  cd. the time  goes by much quicker with the newer drive.

Ed Shape Archvisit for SMECC

see our technological past at  www.smecc.org

[Mike Coan]

Thanks for all the responses.  The burned Cd was in fact a CD-RW disk.  I will try it with just a CDR disk to see if that changes anything.  If I have to get a new CD-ROM drive I may just gt a new machine.  Was just trying to use an existing machine to save the nonprofit some money.  Might make more sense to get a new machine.

Mike

>
> Had a problem like this also...
>
> the older drives really HATE rewritable cd media! I think I
> solved this by using CDR instead of CDRW media.
>
> What type of Media did you do the burn on?
>
> With the newer faster drives that are really cheap now an
> upgrade would  be a blessing  when loading a whole disto
> from  cd. the time  goes by much quicker with the newer drive.
>
> Ed Shape Archvisit for SMECC
>
> see our technological past at  www.smecc.org