i have tried for about 4 days now to install mandrake 9.1 and 10.1... failed miserably... when i reboot (with floppy and cd) it says "boot failed"... donno what to do...

have you checked your BIOS?

i put this in the newbie section for a reason... lol... whats bios and how do i check it?

Go into your BIOS and check if CD-ROM or floppy is listed to boot to. Some systems needs the CD-ROM to be placed on the Master connector and making sure the jumper is set to master on the CD-ROM too.

I suggest you learn more about computer hardware before using Linux. It helps to have some knowledge about computer hardware when using Linux.

Check your manuals if you have them. They usually explain a good bit. If someone didnt build it for you and you have a dell or compaq etc maybe just try google with "what is a bios" or something along that line.

Don' t let this bull$hit scare you away, yes some hardware knowlegde would help but not THAT necessary. Hey Electro by "Master Connector" due you mean primary controller, and if the CD-ROM was Master would the Harddrive be the slave? I don't think so.

People like you are the reason so many people give up on linux. Stop wasting your keystrokes and other peoples time. Stay out of the Newbie forum if your not going to help..cuz guess what? YA that what it for!


NOW, THEWEIRDONE,
When you first start your box up pay attention to the screen you want to get into your setup (bios) menu. Most use F!,F2 or delete you'll want to pick boot sequence you want to change it to CDROM,A,C or CDROM,FLOPPY,HARDDISK it could be worded a few different ways but you get the idea. you may have to look around in there but it IS in there. just be careful of what you do. Make sure you save changes on exit. That should fix your problem. any prob replay back. Good luck

PS: DON"T GIVE UP , It's not THAT hard it is a much better system than Windows, it just takes a little getting used to. Mandrake is a very good distro fresh out of windows.

That was not bullshit. What I mean is some old computers can only boot to devices that are set as Master. Your CD-ROM can be either on Primary or Secondary channel on your IDE controller. If you know this, you will understand.

The Award BIOS does not matter if the CD-ROM or hard drive is set to Master or Slave. It will still boot to those devices. Pheonix BIOS has a limit what drives are bootable. Only Master IDE devices can be used for booting.

I guess people in here do not have common sense to read whats on the screen when you first turn on your computer. Something like "Press blah,blah to enter in BIOS setup". Usually its in bold white text. You can not miss it during the boot process unless you activate quick boot in the BIOS.

theweirdone, when you burn the CDs did you select burn with an image or did you select burn with a file because I can see why you are having problems. Re-burn your CD but make sure you select burn with from an image or something similar. This problem is the highest on the list when people switch from Windows to Linux. Before you burn the images to the CDs, use an md5sum program to verify if they are correct. If you used BitTorrent to download the images, you do not have to verify the images because BitTorrent always verify when downloading files. Setting your system to fail-safe settings will make installing Linux a little easier. Setting the hard drive geometry format to LBA instead of auto, large, or normal will squeeze out bootloader problems, but I suggest backing up your drive before making this change.

Keep an eye on system temperature in Linux because it uses every last drop of performance that your computer has. Windows only uses about 70% to 80% of your computer so you can easily overclock it or use a cheaper heatsink. In Linux, overclocking or using cheap heatsinks is not very smart.


snatale1, hows that is that what you wanted.

I'll well aware of system building and the configuration. I was not saying your wrong. THe prob is the way you word things basically defends what the Windows world says. "Normal people can't use linux" "You need the be a compu nerd to be able to understand linux" Unless you can build your own computer you can't use linux" In the Slack world maybee, but the weirdone is trying MDK, and only held up by a boot order. Way back to my 233mhz machine still had boot order in the setup.
So i'm sure his does, He asked a simple question. If that was me not knowing anything a would have been discouraged by that post, thats all....who cares prob solved hopefully.

back to the original problem...

I had a similar problem with an older machine.

Mandrake 9.2 installed ok, but that system would not boot up. I moved the hard drive to a newer machine, and that install booted up ok. I moved the working install from the newer machine to the old one, and it refused to boot.
Both machines had been running windows 98 with no problems.
I do not have an explanation, just guessing that the bios does not like lilo. Didn't know enough at the time to try grub

I also had trouble getting the old machine to boot from the cd - ended up making a boot floppy.
Neither machine would boot from or read from the dvd, so I had to burn the 4 cd images.

About the boot priority, most modern bios will support selecting the boot device.
some use first hard drive (primary master)
second hard drive (primary slave)
third hard drive (secondary master)

some call the drives (mistakenly) drive c drive d etc

others use floppy, ide (primary master) cd-rom
these can be fussy about where the cdrom is located, and may not give you multiple hard drives to choose from.

for now, blame the bios (upgrade maybe?) and try a different way to boot up.

Stuart