Fedora is driving me insane

I've been trying to install Fedora Core 9 on an ancient computer in the Optics Lab at school and I'm experiencing all sorts of craziness. When the graphical installer gets to the end it says:

No kernel packages were installed on your system. Your boot loader configuration will not be changed.

What on earth could cause a linux distro to NOT install the kernel? It boggles the mind.

I've had this problem since last week and even posted on the Fedora Forums, so far to no avail.

Today I got the smart idea to run the media test on the cds I was using to install Fedora. The very first disc got registered as bad by 12% in. When I saw Fedora complaining about the disc I thought that it could either the ISO or the cd itself. I downloaded JSummer and ran it against all the ISOs and as far as I could tell they were all good. At this point I figured it had to be the cd and not the ISO so I tried burning it again, but the second cd failed in exactly the same place, so I started downloading a new copy of the 600+ meg ISO. By then I had to leave, tomorrow I'll burn the new download of the ISO and try it again.

Tonight when I got home I downloaded all the ISOs off bittorrent. I burned the discs and started an install on an old box that's been collecting dust in the corner. Before I started the installation I ran an SHA1SUM on the ISOs and they all checked out. When I ran the media check on the first disc it got all the way to 100% and then it said the disc had errors! I decided I didn't care and went ahead with installing anyways, but at some point during the installation of libraries from disc2 it bombed out on me.

So, either I downloaded bad ISOs both at work and at home and yet they still managed to get past SHA1SUM and burn the discs correctly, or, all the cds I'm using are bad. I find either of these possibilities unlikely. I think it's more like that the Fedora Core 9 graphical installer is just bad for anything but the latest and greatest computer.