Number 9, number 9. Fedora 9 Preview has been cleared for takeoff!

If your CD is scratchy, or your drive is on its last legs, it will often just "go out to
lunch" when the OS asks for information. Often this will be accompanied by wheezing or
scratching noises as it tries to spin up and fails, over and over.

On older hardware, it takes a few tries before the machine will boot off of a CD-- any CD.
Laptop CD drives are the worst-- the older ones will sometimes even choke on factory-pressed
CDs.

Every time I try to install a new OS, I invariably get checksum errors on my install media.
Never fails. 

The moral of the story? DVD/CD drives are flaky. Burned discs were always a semi-standard
hack. Just do a min-install by CD and then pull everything else from the network. Much less
hassle.