"Edenyard" mail@edenyard.co.uk writes:

with the 'vanilla' one (is that the right term??). Having installed the

Yes.

So I'm stumped (again) and my question (eventually!) is: where do I go from here? Why does the CD drive get locked up like this? (And why didn't it happen whilst installing Slackware 8?)

Might be something about the controller or drive that it doesn't like. I see you have it on hdc (secondary master, usually). Have you tried moving it to the same controller as the hard disk (hdb, primary slave)? If it works then, it's probably that controller it doesn't like. Whether you want to try that depends how comfortable you are with rewiring and moving jumpers. It would give a good clue as to what's wrong, though.

Of course, if the two controllers are identical and it works, that's very very strange.