Hi all,

This may be a silly question, but here goes:

I looked at a number of postings (and their sequelae) here about installing from a home-burnt CD after I downloaded all 3 Mandrake CDs. None of them really seem to answer the question I have in mind . . .

The question is this: does one burn the unextracted "as is" downloaded ISO file to the CD, or extract it first and then burn the extracted files to the CD? I can set up the BIOS on this (new) system to install from CD so that part is not a problem. However, I have been trying to burn a live CD recently with no success, so I want to partition my hard drive and have a dual-boot with XP Pro.

The system is an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ with 80Gb HDD, 512Mb DDR which I built myself. I would dearly love to get LinuxMandrake working on this system, firstly because (despite problems with previous versions) I did actually like what I saw with MDK7.0, and secondly (perhaps) a predictable disenchantment with Micro$oft.

Any answers, people?

Andrew.

You don't need to extract the files from the iso first, in fact if you write files using a application like nero, it actually makes an iso first and then burns it to the cd.

I'm assuming you're doing this under windows, so in your chosen cd writing app, you need to select the 'burn image' or 'copy image to cd' option or something similar. IIRC in nero you do 'file' then 'burn image' for example.
Hope that helps,

Nuk

Hi nuk,

Yes, I have a recent copy of Nero which I have been using, and I will do as you suggest - as soon as I have got hold of a copy of Partition Magic.

Thanks,

Andrew. ^_^ (in South Korea)

Hi!
How are these ISO's compressed? If they are .iso files, then you can use any burner to burn them (it's usually called "Burn CD Image" or something...). This page tells you how to burn an ISO with multiple programs: How to Write ISO Files to CD.

However, if the ISOs are something like .iso.gz, .iso.bz2, .iso.zip, .iso.rar, etc etc, then you'll need to extract them first. 7-Zip is good. I'm sure there's other compressor/decompresser programs for Windows, but none come to mind right now.
After you've decompressed the ISO, burn it the same way as I described above.

Good luck and have fun with Linux!
--
Taj

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Nero doesn't make an ISO first, it makes an image of what to burn.

What you D/L is an ISO, and you need to open it up with something like untar, or unzip.

WinRAR or the new WinZip should work for that.

Then you burn it to a CD, or it won't work.

I have heard that (some of) the newer ISOs will install without un-taring or un-zipping them, but I have yet to see that happen.

PM
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