Inspiron 7000 Debian Install - It Can't Be the CDROM
Folks, I appreciate the feedback in my continuing adventure to get Debian on my proof-of-concept Dell Inspiron 7000.

I reburned Disk 1 to another burner, verified it and all was fine. Tonight I try to install from that CD and the process fails in exactly the same way, at exactly the same time. I can't believe its the CD or the burners anymore.

I tried several boot parameters mentioned in the CD installation documentation such as setting hw-detect/start_pcmcia=false, and debian-installer/probe/usb=false, to no effect. I've set boot_debug=2 and /var/logs/messages just has a list of modules that have been loaded.

I then tried an "expert" installation and garnered this information:

From the "Modules to Load" section I unchecked floppy (Linux Floppy), and usb-storage (USB storage).

I left all the other modules loaded and active. I loaded the modules, each with no additional parameters.

The CD became active when the ide_cd module was loaded.

I elected NOT to start PC card services.

It then said:

"Unable to load some modules
Linux kernel modules needed to drive some of your hardware are not available yet. Simply proceeding with the install may make these modules available later.

The unavailable modules, and the devices that need them are: agpgart (Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX/DX - 82443BX/ZX/DX Host bridge), ide-mod (Linux IDE driver), ide-probe-mod (Linux IDE probe driver), ide-generic (Linux IDE support), ide-floppy (LInux IDE floppy)

Continue"

At this point it did its regular scan of the CD ROM and when it was done it gave the encouraging message of:

"CD-ROM detected
The CD-ROM autodetection was successful. A CD-ROM drive has been found and it currently contains the CD Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 r0a "Sarge" - Official i386 Binary-1 (20050607). The installation will now continue.

Continue"

I do so, and move to "Load installer components from CD." It immediately comes back with my error message of

"There was a problem reading data from the CDROM. Please make sure it is in the drive. If retrying does not work, you should check the integrity of your CDROM.

Failed to copy file from CDROM. Retry? Yes No

If I retry it comes back with this message inside of .1 seconds and does not attempt to access the CD-ROM as far as I can tell.

Not quite sure where to go from here. I'm considering burning and trying to load "Feather Linux" just as a test, but I almost religiously wanted GNU/Linux on this machine. :-\