"knesbitt"
Wow, I just opened my 8.2 Professional CD set only to find major scratches to most of the disks. After carefully removing the first DVD from its sleeve only to find a mess of scratches, I cut the corners on each of the remaining sleeves with an exacto knife and removed the disks by lifting the upper sleeve away and extracting the disk. They were all scrathed but to a lessor degree. My DVD 1 (Install) stalls after selecting "new system", during the pre-partitioning phase of the install. Is this a result of the disk damage? The CD 1 seems to work ok, reporting recommended partitions and a full page of install options.
Thanks to your heads up, I ripped the cardboard instead of sliding them out. Mine looked like it had a one inch permanent smudge from the edge to the center hole -- no scratches, and you had to hold it very carefully in the light to see the smudge. DVD 2 had about a 1/4 inch wide smudge that was also hard to see. In my case it looks like a slight processing anomaly -- either due to liquid flow or a polishing phase -- and the rest of the DVD is entirely flawless/scratchless (very pristine.)
Has anyone elce had their DVD #1 fail?
Mine did not fail (I am running 8.2 on the computer that I am typing this from -- and it is beautiful) -- but there were some oddball glitches compared to 8.1 It could be that your problem might be the same DVD bug from 8.1 which effected combo DVD/CD-RW drives -- is yours a "combo"?