Installation Disks not recognized as official disks when booting with floppy
 

Ive got:
P4 3.2GHz
Samsung 160GB HDD
A Toshiba DVD-RW
A JLMS XJ-HD166S DVD-ROM
Generic Floppy
1GB RAM
A GeForce FX 5950 Ultra (256MB)
A Sound Blaster Audigy (i think perhaps audigy 2)
An Intel Modem
A Dlink Wifi card
American Megatrends Bios V2.3
MBoard Made by VIA - Model - P4VT8

i downloaded the iso's of Mandrake 10.0 official from this website, burned the data to disk. When i insert the first cd in windows, it comes up with a prompt to install, make boot floppy, etc. First time i clicked install, it rebooted the machine and still just loaded windows. I checked in the bios that it was set to boot from cd, making sure both cd drives were ahead of the hdd, i even turned off boot from hdd. to no avail. I switched windows on again, then clicked on create a boot floppy. This seemed to work well. I restarted and it booted straight to the floppy. it then asked for the install cd, which i specified as the drive with disc one in it. It informed me that it was not a valid mandrake install cd. I tried the other drive and same result.

any help would be much appreciated.


also i have tried a few different distributions - downloaded from several different locations - to no avail (i have tried slackware 10, fedora 3, vector linux (cant remember version) and finally mandrake all with no joy. either the cd wont boot or floppy is corrupt, unable to install, wrong disk, etc)

as i have said any help or advice would be very much appreciated because i am fed up with windows.

It sounds like you either may be burning the disks incorrectly or your burning software driver chain is corrupt.

Under Winblows, installing multiple CD-ROM burning packages will install chained drivers that conflict with each other.

Even removing the offending packages does not undo the damage done and you get burned disks which are "out of spec" though at times readable.

See: Microsoft's knowledge base on this, vis-a-vis Roxio and "miniport IDE" for more info.

well i had the same proble wear windows would see the cd and do just what you said. i came to find that the cd drive i was useing would not work with linux.. i installed another i had at home and it booted and installed just fine maybe that could help you as well



kwick

i just used the roxio thing that comes with windows, and winrar to open the .iso packages. i haven't installed any other burning engines, having only done a complete format and repartition of the hdd only a week and a half ago (how long ive been trying to install linux).

is it ok to use winrar to open the iso. i copied the files from the folder it created to the DVD-RW drive and just clicked write cd.
i tried it also on a sony laptop, which came preinstalled with drag'n'drop cd and dvd. neither worked.
i tried the disk in the drive of the laptop, and in both drives on the desktop. no joy. unfortunately the laptop doesnt have a floppy to try (its a PCG-TR5MP) one of the ultraportable sony's.
any other suggestions to help or should i just buy the cd. (if buy, how much is it and where can i get it?) i really dont have hours to spend fiddleing except with the laptop, cos i am normally at school. i want to change over to linux on both machines, but i would ideally like to try it on the desktop before i fully commit to it on my laptop, just to ensure it has at least the same functionality of windows. although if open office is the same on both its looking good.

p.s. on the side, can you advise me of a good graphics program comparable to corel's 'Coreldraw suite'

No you "burn" the ISO image itself using the "burn image file" option, directly.

You DO NOT unpack it or extract files from it.

there isnt one that i could find, i looked for it (could you perhaps suggest a program that wont mess things up too much, but will write .iso's)

and which cd's should i remake, only cd 1 or all three? (ideally one, because after downloading all those distro's, im almost fresh outa blank cd's)

ok download ultra iso for downloads.com its a free trail then goto www.clonecd.net/ and download clone cd it is also a free trail once that is done open ultra iso then click tools then convert find the iso #1 and then check the ccd extention so it will convert the iso to clone cd format then convert it. once that is done open clone cd and then click write image goto the folder that the iso was converted to ccd and open it and write it very easy gl if you need help i can help you pm me



kwick

thanks, will give that a try

Bleh

What a waste of time... and likely to loose the boot information... which you are already having problems with.

Instead google for dvddecrypter.

It has a built in CD/DVD/ burning engine which you can use to burn ISO images directly w/o any massaging required.

(It's also quite useful for duplicating DVD movies too, when used with DVDSHRINK which is also free...)

downloading now - thanks

it worked great, and im now running mandrake on my desktop, but still having problems with my laptop, ill put that on a different thread though

Hey great!

wtg man i hope you have better luck then i do lol my eyes are going blurry from reading lol



kwick