Ultimate Noob Question

[Ed Berger]

imag1nary number wrote:
Unfortunately booting the LiveCD has stumped me.  It asks 
something like where to mount root, then gives the options to panic, 
abort, and something else.  
I had a similar problems, where I had hard disk on one IDE cable, set as 
master, (or as a SATA on another machine), and optical drive (dvd-rw or 
cdrw) on the other IDE as master.  My fix was to add a second optical 
drive (liteon dvd-rom) as a slave drive, on the IDE cable of the 
non-functional optical drive, and for whatever reason, booting from that 
functioned.

I didn't look farther than that, since it fixed the immediate problem 
that stopped installs from functioning.

I see other problems with errors when trying to talk to the optical 
drives complaining about misaligned accesses, not multiple of 2 sectors, 
or something like that, where cdcontrol might work, to play tracks of an 
audio cd, with the error, or it might not, depending on the drive.