Hi, everyone, just went through some trouble and wanted to write the solution I found.
First, the problem:
Old, but still efficient AMD Sempron ~1.6MHz CPU, 1.6 GB RAM, Nvidia card (series 6), HD replaced (original is on the roof -- it's a joke) -- all in all, a reasonable machine, and I wanted to make it work again.
BUT... the DVD drive was malfunctioning. Several DVDs wouldn't boot, or booted up to some point and started to show "SquashFS error reading sector nnn" or something. I mean _several_: recorded at low speed (4x), at medium speed (6x and 8x), at the speed the drive had printed on it (16x). The only things which worked were CDs (but not every one!).
I do have an external DVD drive, but that machine BIOS wouldn't recognize it -- not as USB CDROM and not as USB HDD. USB FDD and USB ZIP, as I recall, didn't work, too. I seem to recall it being recognized as USB LS120 (whatever that may be), but a DVD wouldn't boot anyway.
Luckily Mageia 4.1 Live CD booted and could be installed. Except... no possibility to change from an English locale to Portuguese (same problem as above). After reading the suggestion about re-installing all packages, I decided to explore other ideas...
The solution:
Seeing the external drive worked correctly with the English Mageia, I tried to find a way to boot a small version which would then allow booting from the (by then working) external drive. Maybe there's a way to do it directly from a live version -- but not in mine knowledge.
Fortunately, after much digging, I found the "Wired Network-based Installation CD" would install from a bunch of sources, not just the network (which was also a good option). In particular, it could install from CDROM.
Seriously, guys, what about changing the name to something like "Multiple origin installation launcher"? (ok, I'm not good at names, too...)
Alas, it didn't work. It found the drive, alright, but wouldn't boot the Mageia DVD in it. But there was an option to use a USB HDD. I tried the "isodumper" thing and it didn't boot, but this time I suspected the ISO image would be booted directly (which is why I think there must be a way to do it directly from the Live CD).
And voilà! It worked. Kinda.
On first boot, things were working quite nicely until some UUID xx13 was sought, not found and thus a timeout occurred (and the PC froze). Booting again with the Live CD and examining fstab I saw that was the USB drive, expected as sdb1. Inserted again the drive and all went fine. Except I didn't want it to remain there.
I did the following things and got rid of the USB drive:
a) removed the local medias with Drakconf, adding internet based ones;
b) reboot the Live CD;
c) edited "device.map" in /boot/grub, removing hd1 (the USB drive)
d) edited menu.lst in the boot and got rid of the last entry, "Windows", a reference to the FAT32 USB drive;
e) at last, edited fstab in /etc and got rid of the reference to the USB drive (sdb1, in the present case).
After all that, Mageia 4.1 is booting nicely. It even updated everything with a "urpmi --auto-update". The only difference is that tty2 is assigned the graphical UI, tty3 can be used as text console, but tty1 just shows a black screen. Perhaps there's something yet to be done.
From all this, I wonder if a USB drive should be considered removable (just like a DVD-ROM); the system should boot without it and should ask for it, just like it asks for the install CDROM when we install a new package.
