Hello, I am a computer engineer with very limited knowledge of linux based OS's, I have only ever messed with Vi, the gcc, and a bit of cake development environment. I am getting envolved in some fairly extensive projects at work involving fedora & Red Hat Enterprise systems and have built a system for home to start getting a good grasp on the OS, and start messing with its kernels.

Now that that is out of the way, I got Fedora Core 6 DVD with the Sams Unleashed book I purchased to get me on my way, built my system, configured bios, poped in DVD, and I get this message.

"DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

I am at a loss, I checked hardware compatability with all sorts of sources, and I should be ok... I also loaded a copy of win2k and ran hardware diags to make sure I didnt have a piece of bad hardware, every thing checked out.

My setup is as follows:

ASUS P4M80-M4 Motherboard
Intel 3.2 Prescot 478 Socket CPU
2 x Kingston 512MB DDR 400 PC3200 CL3 184-pin RAM
250 GB SATA Wester Digital Caviar SE16 Hard Drive
Lite-On LTN486 48 MAX YD01 CD ROM Drive

only peripherals are keyboard and monitor.

I have tried switching out the HD with an old 80Gig Western Digital EIDE drive after I read about some people having problems with SATAs, but I get the same thing. I have also tried using only one DIMM of meomry... both DIMM slots, and both sticks of memory in each.

I am downloading the first ISO from Red Hat right now, but at current time it has 23:20 left at only 3% finished... on the first freakin one. Really wish I could avoid that rediculous speed, especially since I have a feeling that the CD isnt the problem.

I have searched and searched the forums for this, and found a few similar problems, but no one ever posted a solution. Please please please help, I really need this thing running ASAP.

Thank you in advance, and sorry that was so long.

I think it is most likely that the disk that came with the book isn't any good, either continue downloading and write the iso images to your own disk or you could buy the disks on the net.

Oh and you could complain to sams they'll probably offer to send you new disks but that could take a while.

Chris.

Hmm, well, I suppose I will find out if it is the disk in what will be 25hrs now. Definitly going to complain to Sams if it is a bad disk.

Thanks Chris

I will post up the resolution once the ISO is done, but in the mean time... does anyone else have any ideas?

It was the stupid cd... on another note, the reason that it was taking so long to download was apparently that I was trying to use IE... switched systems and downloaded it through Mozila, took 20min.

Dont know if that is a known problem...