Regarding the firewire-connected CDROM: perhaps this is just a general firewire problem. On an already-installed-and-operational Lenny system, when I insert a CD and then connect the drive I see this in dmesg repeated 10 times at 27 second intervals: [ 2864.550279] sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE,SUGGEST_OK [ 2864.550279] sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [ 2864.550279] sr 2:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: No seek complete [ 2864.550279] end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 283936 [ 2864.550279] Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block 70984 and the CD never becomes mountable ("mount: special device /dev/scd0 does not exist"). However, if I connect the drive and _then_ insert the CD it works okay. I need to test this more to make sure the pattern holds but with this knowledge I tried another install from the firewire-connected CDROM. This time after cdrom-detect failed I disconnected the drive, reconnected without the media, inserted the CD, retried cdrom-detect and the install proceeded, though very very slowly. Each access to the CD seemed to cause a series of errors and delays like the above. (grub-install also failed the first time with the "Error 6: Mismatched or corrupt version of stage1/stage2" I've seen on other machines, though it doesn't always happen on this one.) The attached install3.tgz is the logs from a minimal _etch_ install where cdrom-detect has no trouble. install4.tgz is from this painful-but-finally-successful lenny install.
Attachment:
install4.tgz
Description: application/tgz
Attachment:
install3.tgz
Description: application/tgz