Hi everyone. I think this is bizarre and evil behavior. But then again I could have simply misunderstood half of what I have read, and brought this all on my head.

I downloaded six livecds of the CENTOS 5, burned them to individual cds, and am now trying to install the CENTOS 5 on my pc. I load cd 1 into the dvd rw device, restart my pc, and then get the BIOS to present to me a menu of where to boot from. It's either the HD or the cd. I choose the CD and press enter.

Nothing. It starts up winxp pro.

I have done this for the nth time already.

Am I missing a CD or something? Is CD 1 of the six CENTOS livecds supposed to start the install of the whole shebang on my pc? No?

I read somewhere that this could be due to corrupt ISO. Is that a fairly common problem? Could be painful, if it is.

Due to bandwidth problems at work, I wound up downloading my ISOs through http instead of bittorrent, but use md5sum once they are downloaded. If you have a slow or unstable internet connection, use bittorrent. I believe there are torrents for CentOS.

Either way, bittorrent or verifying the MD5, you'll know it is not your CDs; it's Memorex.

Hi,

I would check the md5sum. If you downloaded the cd/dvd iso then be sure to check the md5sum for the original iso. From the cli;

If the iso md5 is ok then you should try 'CdromMd5sumsAfterBurning''.

This way you will know if the burn was OK!

This will check the download iso with the known md5sum that you also get with the iso.

The link(s) and others are available from 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!

I was thinking of using the md5sum, just to save time. But don't I have to have the md5sums from the original livecds. And then compare those with the md5sums of the cds I burned, or the files I downloaded? I don't believe there were any md5sums from the original livecds. Come to think of it, I don't think I have seen much md5sums before.

Sorry, I am not familiar with either of the solutions you gave me. I have an adsl+ connection to the net.

Thanks onebuck. Sorry, I didn't see your reply when I posted my response to cmnorton.

From what you write, it seems as if you incorrectly burned the ISO image. Please forgive me for asking this question, but did you just drag and drop the downloaded ISO onto the destination CD or did you properly burn the ISO contents to the CD? This makes a world of difference. I have to ask this question as I have seen person after person improperly burn an ISO image.

When you place the 1st CD into your drive and view it from another computer, do you see CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-1of6.iso or a bunch of other stuff? If you see the ISO, then you improperly created the CD.

darien, I think you hit the thing right on the head. I googled about iso images and found that I need to unpack it before burning the unpacked stuff on cds. It's obvious isn't it? Ah the joys of being ignorant and naive. One can discover; one can learn.

Maskiepop:

No need to extract the ISO to burn to CD/DVD. Even if you did that, you would probably lose the CD’S boot ability. What you will need to do is make sure your CD/DVD burning application supports creating a disk from image.

If you are using a later version of Nero, use the File  Open dialog box to burn your ISO image. Roxio’s procedure is a little different. Check the built-in help function for clarification.

For a small, free CD/DVD burning utility, see http://cdburnerxp.se/.

For more options, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._cost_software.