Hey, all. I have an interesting one for you.

I just came across a Piii 1ghz machine. It has a DVD-ROM drive and a CD/RW drive.

I'm trying to install Mandriva on it (I plan on using it as a PVR). Here's what's going on:

For some reason, I can't get it to boot to my Mandriva 2007 DVD; I AM able to get it to boot to my Mandriva 2006 CD's. I've cleaned the drive thoroughly, with no change. I'm assuming that this is a limitation of the BIOS, and not an actual DVD problem (Yes, the disc works). I'm convinced that this problem won't go away and so I'm trying to come up with a workaround for this.

How can I throw in a CD, boot to it, and then open up the 2007 DVD AND run the Mandriva setup program? I'm all ears.

I'd like to throw out there that when you live in Alaska you have a bandwidth cap (10GB/month) which pretty much sucks, so, in other words, downloading more than 1 CD iso is a no-go for me (the Mandriva CD version is I believe 3 CDs).

I much prefer 2007 for PVR because it has a nice updated MythTV in the repositories, which also include FCEU and some other emulators that are NOT included in the 2006 repositories. That's a lot to compile should I use 2006.

Any comments or suggestions? Thanks in advance for your help!
~Joe

If you have two drives, probably just the master of them is being checked for a bootable disc by BIOS. You should be able to see this from within your BIOS and perhaps even change the boot sequence to allow checking the other (DVD) drive too, in addition to the CD drive. My BIOS doesn't allow me to do this, I'm pretty sure I checked it once, and back when I needed to boot from a 2nd drive (1st one became defective) I needed to physically change the master to slave and vice versa. Most pcs, at least every one I've seen, only try to boot from the master cd/dvd-drive if they have more than one.

I'm quite sure you could boot from the CD, then tell the installer to look for the installation media from the DVD and so on, but it might get complicated so I suggest you just switch your master/slave configuration and re-try.

Everything in the boot sequence is set up correctly. I should've mentioned that when I was booting to the CD's I was using the CD/DVD drive. When using that drive, the machine will boot to a CD, but it won't boot to a DVD. And the CD/RW drive I haven't even tried yet.

Thanks for you help,
~Joe