Today I tried to install Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) on a rack server at work that did not have a CD drive.  The easiest thing to do was to use an external USB CD drive.  Unfortunately I was getting an error once Ubuntu started loading:

Buffer I/O error on device sr0, logical block xxxxxx
end_request: I/O error on device sr0, sector xxxxxx

A little research into this problem revealed that it’s usually not something wrong with the distribution, but rather something wrong with how the CD was burned, the drive, or the hard drive.  I did a MD5 check on the disk and that was fine, and I knew the disk had already been used before and was burned at a low speed (Always crucial when writing an ISO)

I also tried adding some parameters to the boot option (Which didn’t work, but I’d give it a try, and get rid of the ‘quite’ flag):

• irqpoll
• noapic
• nolapic

Finally, I pulled a SATA DVD drive out of my desktop and plugged it into the server’s motherboard.  Popped the CD in and it worked just fine.

Lesson learned: If you get an error with an external CD drive, try connecting a SATA or IDE drive and using that.

Tags | Linux, Ubuntu