I have just bought a Dell Dimension 9100 with

2.8 GHz dual core
SATA 80 GByte disk (Maxtor GL080M0)
LG DVD+-RW
1 GB RAM
Soundblaster Live
Radeon X300 Graphics card

and no matter which linux distribution I use to boot with (Fedora Core 4/Gentoo/Knoppix Live CD) I always end up with the following message

"Missing operating system"

and cannot get into the install menues at all. The install disks were written under Windows XP Home with Sonic Digital Media DVD writer as bootable images onto both CDs and DVDs

I have seen one thread which talks about a problem with SATA drives and seemed to fix the problem bookting of floppies and Windows XP boot disks. Unfortunately I have neither (no floppy drive, Dell do not provide any Windows disks).

Any advice on how to get round this problem would be gratefully appreciated.

Thanks

Jonathan

I have a Dell Inspiron 9100 dual-booting WindozeXP and Gentoo 2.6 kernel, but my hardware is quite different. Just the most basic questions -- have you checked the BIOS configuration to make sure that you have boot from CD enabled? Also, do you have another computer on which you can try booting the same CD to ensure that the CD is not corrupted? My guess is that the image is corrupted and you might need to burn a new one. Gentoo forums have good instructions for creating bootable CDs.

You can also try creating a Windows "rescue" CD (can't remember the procedure for XP, but you should be able to find it at www.annoyances.org) and see if that boots from a cold start to test basic "boot-from-CD-ability" if you don't want to mess with the BIOS settings at this stage.

Good luck and let us know the outcome.

Thanks for the advice.

Eventually worked out that the software supplied by Dell to write CD images wasn't working right (three different images all bad...). Used Deepburner (free software) and don't seem to have a problem. Hopefully it'll all go swimingly from now

Thanks again

Jonathan