I took the DVD to work and did a media check and all is OK, then I verified it would boot properly and proceed normally so I don’t think it is bad media?
That is a reasonable conclusion.
Then, I borrowed another external DVD drive and plugged it into the same machine and I got the same problem so I think I can rule out the USB DVD drive?
That leaves something in the CPU hardware that causes this problem?
Rule out the USB connection only if you have successfully booted from another CD or DVD. So if you installed Ubuntu or Fedora this same way, then the hardware is working - or more precisely, the software on those DVD’s was able to interface with the bios USB controller (which is different than the USB drivers the OS later loads).
Generally speaking, it does appear that the software on the DVD is struggling with something in your hardware. You get strange behavior on the boot menu screen, which is before the kernel is even called - at that point, the boot loader is the only code loaded. Then the kernel cannot access the graphics device framebuffer, and then it reaches a hard stop on the hardware probe.
Try doing this. Boot from the DVD. At the menu, press the Escape key. You should get a pop-up informing that you are going into text mode; choose OK. You will then get the “boot:” prompt as you did before. Now type this at the prompt:
edd=off acpi=off apm=off nolapic vga=0x303
And hit Enter. You should see the text and dots as you did before, and then the text should appear differently, a more clean, compressed, readable look. That may take you through to the installation. Follow the scrolling carefully; if it hangs, before it reboots you may see what it was trying to do when it hung.
If none of that works, do you still have another linux installed? Or a Live-CD of any sort? Anything bootable. What I’m looking for is a way to determine the primary hardware components. In linux from the command line, this does that:
lspci
In particular, we’ll see the exact chipset, controllers, and graphics device. From there we may find there is an issue with a component, requiring a specific “cheat code” for the kernel (e.g., like the edd above). Often when one distro boots and another does not, it is because the former has something already built into the kernel that the latter requires to be manually specified.
I cannot believe that other people have not had this issue.
I seem to recall something similar on these forums to the strange screen-within-screen in the corner you saw, but the problem was handled by @oldcpu, one of the mods. He has seen a wide range of installation issues. I suggest that you send him a PM asking to take a look at this problem.
Is there a way to jump right into a shell and run in text mode?
You already have. When you typed “linux” at the “boot” text prompt and then saw “linuxrc” and the dots … that was the installation kernel loading into RAM. You said that the machine then rebooted itself - meaning that the kernel encountered a fatal hardware error.