I have a Dell Dimension 5100 and just installed a new 250 gig hard drive .I created 2 primary (healthy)partitions 78 gigs each and installed windows xp onto the first partition.

The second partition is not formatted .

And I left another (ca) 78 gigs unallocated .

When I load the first cd into the tray and reboot the computer the installation screen is supposed to appear upon booting but all that happens is that the windows xp screen comes up and suse does absolutely nothing .

I had previously tried to install Mandrake and had the same problem ,it would not install .

Is Bill creating problems again ?

It appears that the CD is not booting. First, verify that you can boot from a CD--eg the Windows installer disk. If so, then look at your SUSE boot CD and verify that it has a bunch of different files and folders. If, by chance, it only contains one file ending in .iso, then you have stepped into a common trap. You need to re-burn the CD using the "burn from iso" option (or equivalent)

Check in your bios and make sure you have you cdrom drive set to be the first bootable device, if not make it so.