Bug#378078: failed sarge install on laptop

[Brent Burton <brentb@relro.net>]

Joey Hess wrote:
> Brent Burton wrote:
>
> > The log on VC 4 (Alt-F4) shows that a grep for the packages is
> > failing in the "anna" process. Specifically, at line 48 of
> >  /usr/lib/debian-installer/retriever/cdrom-retriever
> > is the statement "suite=$RET".  $RET is an empty string. Thus,
> > grep is searching for the file "/cdrom/dists//Release" (sic)
> > when the path is actually "/cdrom/dists/sarge/Release".
> > The variable "suite" should be "sarge"; modifying cdrom-retriever
> > to explicitly set "suite=sarge" allows the CD to be recognized
> > as an installation CD, and the install continues.
> >
> > This same CD was used to install a few boxes at work and those went
> > fine.
>
>
> The problem is that your laptop is not reliably reading the CD and the
> Release file cannot be read. This generally results in the code that
> tries to determine the suite failing. In etch, this condition is
> detected and an error displayed:
>
> _Description: Error reading Release file
>  The CD-ROM does not seem to contain a valid 'Release' file, or that file
>  could not be read correctly.
>  .
>  You may try to repeat CD-ROM detection but, even if it does succeed the
>  second time, you may experience problems later in the installation.
>
> BTW, turning off DMA for the CD may help.

Thanks for the response and it's taken me a while to re-check this.

I disabled DMA by booting "linux ide=nodma" (2.4 kernel) and
confirmed that DMA was disabled for the cdrom (hdc) by checking
 /proc/ide/hdc/settings.  using_dma was zero.
The install still fails in the exact same place.

At this point, of the 12 reboots of the netinst CD as well as
the normal CD installation, it fails in the exact same way
on both disks, always.

I'll do more searching for similar problems. Thanks again.
-Brent