Are there any distro that will download from the internet?

My CD drive is not bootable. have tried many different configs. I also have 2 known bootable cd's and the drive will not boot. The drive does work as I have downloaded cd's to my iTunes.

any ideas>

Thanks in advance for your help

well what do you have to get the data on there? can you boot from USB? can you take the harddisk out and put it in another computer? could you borrow another cd drive temporaraly?

Does your BIOS support booting from the CD?

If so, have you set it up to do so?

Normally to get to the BIOS settings, you need to press a key, frequently <DEL> or a Function key (the screen should show it) immediately after switching on. On newer machines there is also the possibility of pressing a key (on my machine, it's <F12>) to get a boot menu and you can select the CD from this menu without the need to change BIOS settings.

If you have an AWARD BIOS, the boot devices are on the Advanced BIOS settings (menu option 2).

John

how do I find the BIOS info?

Power down and when you power back up watch closely and you should see which key to hit to go into the bios and then you will need to navigate around to where you can make the CDROM bootable then follow the prompts to save and exit and reboot then put your cd in the drive and reboot and you should be looking at Linux

If you're using a laptop, there's usually a key you have to press to boot from CD.

BIOS A02

I changed it hours ago to make cdrom bootable, but it still dosnt work. yes, I have 2 bootable CD's

Board: Dell Computer Corporation Dimension 4300
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Dell Computer Corporation A02 09/10/2001 Drives

there should be somthing like boot order in the BIOS,
make sure the cd is before the hard drive
as soon as the bios finds somthing bootable it boots and dousent check any further

Usually the BIOS has an option to boot from CD-ROM first. You need to test the function with a windows installation CD to see if it will boot. If it will boot then try using your bootable CDs to see if they will boot up a different machiine