Fedora 2 installation problem.

Machine Compaq 7AP135
ASPEN2 AMD Athlon Slot A Motherboard
AMD Athlon 750 MHZ
512 MB RAM
30 GB ATA Hard Drive
CD/DVD Player & CD R/W
NVIDEA RIVA TNT2 Model 64 Pro Video
Windows XP Pro (NTFS)

Amateur - I have a little UNIX. Fedora is totally new.

I checked the bios and the DVD/CD Reader is bootable. I can also
see it being accessed prior to the hard disk.

I downloaded 4 iso files for Fedora 2 ( FC2-i386-disk1-4.iso )
from a Red Hat mirror site and burned the 4 CD's.

The images were tagged with the Easy CD Creator icon which I
have on my system. I burned each CD by clicking on the icon
associated with each file ( called a easy cd creator image file. )
I did not run md5sum since I could not figure out how. I tried
the DOS prompt. It could not find md5sum. I planned to test the CD's
with the media test module after booting.

When I reboot the machine with the first cd in the drive, the system
accesses the cd reader but never loads anything. Eventually going to
the hard drive to boot. I plan on totally overwriting the C drive
with Fedora after booting.

To complicate the matter. I purchased Beginning Fedora 2 from
WROX Pub. which contains Fedora 2 on bootable DVD. I obtained
the same result as the CD's. The DVD reader is accessed without
loading Fedora and goes to hard drive.

If anybody has a suggestion. Please respond.

Do you have any other CDs you know should work (like a Windows install CD)?

It's unlikely that all your FC2 disks are bad, so I'd doublecheck the boot order in your BIOS. Just because the drive is being accessed doesn't mean the system is trying to boot from it. Make sure it's set to try to boot from the CD or DVD drive *before* trying to boot from the HD.

My boot is set for the CD ROM,Floppy,Hard disk,Network. I am trying a new down load and burn to see what happens. When I burn the image to cd, I get the same image as I dounloaded with the cd creator icon attached. I can't view and linux structure. If I click on the file, it comes up ready to burn a new image. Is this right?

If I put my system cd in the drive the install option screen comes up automatically.

It sounds almost like you didn't burn it correctly. Looking at your post, it looks like you burned the ISO as a data file on the disk, but didn't burn the information on the ISO onto the disk.

Open up your burning program, and see if there is an option to burn an image. When it asks you to find the image, point it to the ISO, wherever you saved it, and let it do it's thing.

Once you do that, try to install Fedora again.

Good luck.

Your hard drive needs to be formatted to FAT32 not NTFS as linux won't install on NTFS. Do a search on LQ for the best way to go about getting a FAT partition.

Hope this helps

string

I bought a copy of Nero disk copy program. Burned the CD's as an iso image. Rebooted and the Fedora install screen came up. As pointed out, I was only copying the iso file to the CD. As it turns out Easy CD creator doesn't do iso images. Nero does. I am at least able to attempt an install. Thanks for the help.