Re: CD ROM peculiarity

[Jason Greenwood]

Hi everyone

I've slowly been installing a Mandrake 9.0 system at home, downloading an
iso cd at a time at work when no one has been looking, and re-installing
with the additional software that evening. 

When you say re-installing do you mean a fresh install or just putting 
the 2nd CD in and going from there on an already installed system??

On Tuesday I burnt the third,
'international' cd, took it home, and the Mandrake would spit it back at me
when I tried to get rpms off it (using installdrake, I think? what ever you
boot of the 1st cd when installing a new system).
The utility is called DrakX. If you are trying to install off of this 
disk then yes, it will fail as the installer resides on the first disk. 
You tell it how many disks you have when you are going through the first 
disks install routine and the installer sets up the RPM lists from that.

I had a look at the directory listing of the disk, and everything is there,
in the right location. I can open up one file and look at it ok, and thats
where the trouble starts - from then on I can ONLY look at that file. ls in
console lists all the files, but appends each file name with 'invalid file'
or 'file not found', I cant quite remember which. Except for the one I
opened previously, it is still there and I can view or install it as I did
previously.
This sounds like a problem with supermount. 9.0 was notorious for these 
problems. Disable supermount (then manually mount the CD) and tell me if 
that helps. You are confusing me here, on the one hand, it seems like 
you are trying to use this disk to install from and on the other hand it 
sounds like you are trying to install individual RPM's from the CD. 
Which is it or are there separate problems?? Also, remember, unless you 
tell DrakX that you have all 3 CD's during the initial install, the 3rd 
cd will not be setup as a source in URPMI/Software manager. You can set 
it up after the fact but that is more of a hassle.

To install another file off the disk, I have to restart the computer. So if
there are dependencies and I need to install two at once, tough.
Yup, sounds like a supermount problem.

The only thing I did different with the third disk was to burn the iso, and
then I added some extra files before closing it completely.  Could this be
the cause of my trouble?
Um, yes, AFAIK you cannot have anything on the disk other than the ISO, 
otherwise you are asking for trouble. To test it, try it with JUST the 
ISO and tell us what happens.

Also, why is it called the international cd? (not cd3)

Because most of the packages on that CD are for foreign language support 
within the distro.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

Jason

PS, you'll want the plf ISO/RPM's as well if you want to burn rip/encode 
MP'3's, watch DVD's etc etc.
See more at:
http://plf.zarb.org/