[accyman]

sounds like you may have a faulty disk if it keeps spitting it out at teh same part of teh instalation as thats what happens if a disk is faulty it tries for a while to read the disk but eventualy gives up and spits it out or just spins endlesly

if thats whats happening and i have understood properly then i woudl go for faulty instalation disk and you could try downloading it from the internet and burning it to your own cdr


now im not sure if this will work as i have very little experience of linux

if you are running windows xp on a seperate partition tehre is a program called cain and abel that shows login passwords for user accounts but imnot sure if it would expose teh linux passwords , tehre maybe a similar program linux based im not sure