going bonkers trying to install fc-5

[Gregory P. Ennis]

On Sun, 2006-06-18 at 18:54 -0500, Peter Horst wrote:
> Boy, I am having such a hard time figuring out what's wrong here.  I had 
> a couple of old beater computers, tried to install fc-5 from a cd set. 
> Hash-verified, should have been decent disks, etc. No dice. Neither 
> computer would "see" the boot disk.  Thought, "oh, well."  Needed a new 
> box anyway. Picked up an emachines t-3418 yesterday.  Burned fc-5 iso 
> disk 1 onto a new Taiyo Yuden 700mb disk - verified that the data is 
> present & accounted for (SHA-1 hash matches). And still! Despite any 
> changes I make to the BIOS settings, I cannot get this computer to boot 
> from the install disk - tried booting from boot.iso, from the recovery 
> disk, nothing. Obviously the common denominator here is me, but I can't 
> figure out what I might be doing wrong.  Can a disk checkout hash-wise 
> and still be bad? What am I missing here?  Could it be the windows 
> software I am using to burn with?
> 
> Any help greatly appreciated.
> 
> Peter
> 

Peter,

I had the same problem with an E-Machine and FC4 and finally figured out
it was a problem with the CD drive.  For some reason the bios would not
boot to that drive.  I swapped drives from a different E-Machine and it
worked fine.  I don't have my notes with me tonight and do not remember
the kind of drive, but it drove me bananas until I stumbled on the
solution.  

Hope this helps!!

Greg