hm, which version of TA3D do you use ?
which package do you use ? (source, binary 32, binary 64)
I think none of released packages contains the installer fix/improvement that makes it retry to find the CD during 5 sec, if it's not mounted when it's looking for it this will fail.
This is how to do:
1) mount the CD
2) start ./hpiview install /media/cdrom (replace /media/cdrom with the path where your CD is mounted)
3) follow instructions (just change CD as asked on screen)
if it still fails, you can install resources manually. Just copy totala2.hpi from the first CD, and extract totala1.hpi from totala3.hpi. you can do that with any HPI viewer or with hpiview:
copy totala3.hpi in TA3D's dir and type:
./hpiview extract install\\totala1.hpi
Game have very stupid manual.
if you want you can help us improving it. Since we are mostly developers and testers are involved in the project for quite some time now we don't see how difficult it can be for new users