I have an emachines t1100 that I want to install Linux on. It came preinstalled with winXP. My problem is that the dang computer wont recognize my linux disks. I know they are good as I have used them in the past. I have tried three different distros as well. It recognizes my win98 setup disk just fine. Why wont it boot the linux installers? I have used the win98 fdisk to remove the old xp partition as well.


Distros Tried: EvilE.17, Redhat 8.1, Mandrake 9.1

Computer Specs:

emachines with intel chipset 810
1 ghz celeron
128 mb ram
onboard video/sound/modem

Thanks for ANY help!!!

steve

Do you have to go into your BIOS setup and push the CD-ROM
up to the top of the boot list?

My Windows box won't boot off the CD unless I alter the
BIOS setup.

OK
I use RH 7.3 on an emachines t1096 and i've never encounter problems to boot the cd rom, however if you can't enable the system to boot the CD then you'll need to create a boot floppy disk (Make sure the disks are empty and functional)

About the drivers for the video, audio, and other devices you'll probably have to download them and I never found the driver for the modem (Actually I use DSL and the intel 810 drivers are included with my Distro.)

Sorry to tell you this: The recovery disk that came with your pc is worthless without the info on the partition you fdisked away.Tech support won't help you with this. Get a full install copy of your OS or make a partition image, otherwise you will be screwed next time windows crashes.

yeah I don't think it's an EMACHINES issue either. I have an EMACHINES system (cheap systems lol) and it's running RH 7.3 without any problems.

I sort of want to believe that the boot sequence of ssallen's system wasn't set properly through BIOS - it's the only thing I can really imagine.

I'd also suggest you first to try to boot up to a bootable CD, no matter if it's a Windows CD you borrowed from a friend or neighbor ...just basically to test and see if the system isn't already set up properly for that. If it boots up to a let's say Windows CD, and it doesn't boot up to the Linux CD, I'd go ahead and try to maybe download and recreate CDs again ...seems the CDs or bootable CD might be corrupt..who knows..

Hope this helps!