[TriLUG] SuSE 9.0 Pro YaST installation source media problem

[Jesse Aaron Safir]

I attempted to install SuSE 9.0 Pro on an Athlon 750 home-built machine
with 256MB RAM and a 10GB HDD.  I did a custom install and added a bunch
of the packages that you don't get by default.  The installation got
through CD1 and CD2 but when it got to CD3 it refused to recognize the CD.
I tried two other copies of CD3 and got the same result.  It also wouldn't
recognize CD4.

I then reattempted the install from CD and blew away the previous install
and just selected the standard install, which only wanted CD1 and CD2.
Once that finished, I brought up YaST and attempted to add the additional
packages and STILL it refused to recognize CD3 or CD4.  I am able to mount
CD3 and CD4 fine with Konqueror and so I created a folder called /install
as root.  I then created subfolders called cd1, cd2, cd3, cd4, and cd5 and
copied all of the installation CDs to those folders.  I went into YaST and
tried to configure these additional sources for the installation media and
it wouldn't show any packages.  Actually, I think I was able to get it to
ONLY show the packages I had already installed and NOT the ones that I
WANTED to install.  The only way I could get it to show the ones that were
NOT installed is by pointing to the actual CD media and then it kept
saying to insert the CDs.  But when I insert the CDs it says "!= SuSE
Linux AG".

I then tried copying all of the media to the cd1 folder and configured
that and it still didn't recognize it.  BTW, I did chmod a+rwx for those
folders so it shouldn't have been a permissions issue.

I also tried configuring a number of SuSE 9.0 FTP installation sites from
ibiblio to gatech to SuSE themselsves and I couldn't get YaST to see any
of the installation sources.

Oh...I also tried swapping out my CD-ROM drive in case that was the
problem.  But the reality is that I can see the CD-ROM and it's contents
fine through Konquereor as /media/cdrom.  YaST tries to access it as
/dev/hdd, I believe but it doesn't matter if I give it different paths
like /media/cdrom or /dev/cdrom or file:/media/cdrom or file:/install/cd1
or whatever.  It refuses to see the install packages.

I have searched every Linux Forum I can find and Google and haven't found
any answers for WTF is going wrong.  Please help!  Thanks!

 ********************************************************
 *  Jesse Aaron Safir, Chief Windows Systems Engineer   *
 *   ITS Server Farm Group, AIS Distributed Computing   *
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