I know there has been many topics over this but mine is different.

I downloaded the one .iso file they had on the site.

i burnt the .iso file to a cd, i set my bios to boot from my DVD-ROM. The computer would not boot from the DVD-ROM
so, i set my bios to boot from my cd-rw drive, it wouldnt boot.

i downloaded a program that let me open the .iso file, i extracted the folders and burnt them to another cd. the folders/files i burnt to the cd are as follows:
college
isolinux
kernels
bootCatalog
bootImage.img
after burning those to a cd, i then tryed booting from my DVD-ROM again, nothing happened. Then i tryed the cd-rw again, nothing happened. (i changed my bios each times)

I downloaded rawritewin and the sbootmgr.img, i copied it to a disk, and it booted from their, but when i selected to boot from my cd, it would pop up with a error.
I tryed putting in the ide location numbers and it still didnt work.


please tell me someone, what am i doing wrong?

First, I assume you can boot SOMETHING from your CD drive, can you? Have you checked?

Just because the BIOS allows a boot from your CD drive does not necessarily mean it can be done. Your CD drive has to support it as well.

Ok, assuming that your CD drive supports that, then it depends on what sort of ISO you are burning. An ISO file is simply an image, it may not be bootable.

SuSE Linux, for example, has a bootable ISO image you can download to check this. It is not a large file, so if you have an extra blank CDR and want to download it to check, it can be found here:

"ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/i386/9.0/boot/boot.iso"

Hope that helps.



Cheers!

i can boot win98, winxp, and my red hat 9 CDs. The .iso should be bootable. it is college linux. www.college.ch/linux
it only has one .iso, and they say its bootable.

When I burn bootable iso images, I have to specifically inform the burning software that I'm burning a bootable image. In Roxio, I needed to specifically pull down the option "burn image to CD" or something like that and then select iso. Otherwise, you're simply burning data which is not bootable

i think that might be the problem. because im just using windowsXP built in burner. the Click and Drag burn thing.

That IS very likely the problem. I would suggest either Roxio, or Nero for this. I personally use Nero, and like Roxio it has a separate area for burning an ISO image.

I'd be willing to bet that will fix your problem.

# How do I burn a bootable CD with Nero?
Information and Links For Nero CD Burning Software