Need help dual-booting and burning images
 

Hey Guys,
I currently use Windows Xp, and have decided that enough is enough and that i should try Linux.

After having a look at some distro's i decided to try Fedora as i heard it was easy to use. I downloaded it (some 3.1 gb's) and tryed to burn the boot.iso image to a cd-rom. When i put in the cd nothing happened, it just booted in windows (BIOS settings are set to try CD first :S). So in refernce to that, what the hell could I be doing wrong, i also tried burning the whole .iso to a dvd and the same happened.

Also i have found an old 20 gig harddrive and put that in my computer, i reformated it, and made the file system FAT32. I plan on using this for my linux use, but do i need to further partition that for use, i keep reading about making one part twice the size of ram and the other called root, but i dont really know too much about that.

And lastly, after thinking some more, i dont know if i should use Fedora, or try Slackware, i have a good guide on the net, but i hear that it is way too hard for a begginer. Well you only learn by doing, but i would like to know if i would be wasting my time trying Slackware.

The ISO image is just that an image of the DVD installation media (The fact you downloaded a 3.1-GB file suggests this). Now most Windows 'burning applications' have an option to burn ISO image file to the media. A quick check of the media will tell if you burned it correctly, if you see only one file then no you burned it wrong. Even if you see multiple files and directories you may have still burned the image incorrectly. Maybe this may help;

http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/howtoburn.html

Why???? Linux (most versions) does not use Microsoft filesystems for the OS. That is OK, during the installation process you will be given the chance to fix this.

The choice is yours, but if you do plan on using either make sure you have reviewed the release notes and installation guide(s). For Fedora Core look here;

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.
How are you burning the CDs? Windows can not natively i.e. no built in utility to create a CD from an ISO file. You need Roxio, Nero or a free iso burning app like isorecorder.

linux uses its own filesystem can creates several partitions so it is best to leave the drive unpartitioned.

The twice the size of ram is refering to the swap partiton. This is similar to windows pagefile.sys i.e. virtrual memory but linux uses a partition instead of a file. The 2X RAM is rule is outdated and the size of swap really depends on what applications you are going to run and how much memory is installed. Basically a 512MB swap is good enough for most desktop users. /(root) is the top of the file tree i.e. similar to windows c:\. However, the difference between windows and linux is that everything i.e all drives i.e. floppy, CD, DVD and other physical hard drives/partitions fall under /.

Fedora is a good distribution to start with.

Okay, I'm still having problems even getting my computer to recognise my cd.

For a start, when i go into my BIOS settings and look at the booting order', it goes like this
1. Onboard or USB CD-Rom Drive (not present)
2. Onboard SATA Drive etc...

Does the (not present) mean that it cannot find my cd-drive, or that it doesnt think there is a bootable cd in there?

And while I'm here, i may as well make sure that i am burning the right image onto a cd...

I'm trying Slackware 10.2...
ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.sla...ware-10.2-iso/
And I'm downloading this 'slackware-10.2-install-d1.iso' + 'slackware-10.2-install-d2.iso'..

Anyone see any problems with that?

And i have burnt the first onto a CD using Nero, with no luck at boot up..

Really hope someone can help pin point the problem, and please ask if there is anything that i have no made clear.

Thanks for the previous replies as well!

EDIT: Just found out that the file i have is NOT corrupted, the md5 matches with that on their website !!

1. I think that (Not Present) means it cannot detect you have a CD-ROM drive, as far as I know BIOS doesn't check drives to see if you have or haven't CD's in.
2. There is no problem in trying slack and yes CD1 and CD2 are the ones you need.
3. As for the burning of the CD's you must not write the *.iso as a file to your CD , you must use the "Burn Image onto disc" ,r something like that, option.

Two things:

1. Find ANY bootable CD and make sure your machine will boot it. No sense struggling further if this part is not working.
2. Confirm that you are burning the CD from the .iso image---not just copying the .iso file. As other have said, you have to wind up with **many** files on the disk.