hdc (cdrom) timeout

[zjg144]

I'm currently on a trying out distro binge and while trying to install Gentoo I've run into this little problem.

I've got the universal liveCD and I've partitioned everything set up the file systems and mounted them in the correct places but when it comes to extracting the stage tarball the cdrom times out.

I get an error of something similar to:
hdc: irq timeout ::some Hex:: sector whatever busy.
it does that a couple times then resets the cdrom tries again and then gives me an IO error.

Now I thought it might be that I just had a bad drive on my extremely old NEC Versa laptop so I went on to my Desktop and the same thing occured.

Any insight welcome. I've done some research as well and found people with similar problems but none with solutions.

[zjg144]

After messing around for awhile... I have not prevailed but.

However, I have thought of addressing the problem a different way. Let me know if you think my judgement is sound. If I set up the network and download the tarball. It wouldn't need to be read and extracted from the disk therefore no timeout. Somewhat redundant if I have access to the file already but please someone let me know what you think.
thanks