I bought my nephew a new Mac a couple of months ago. He decided he would give his old machine (A three year old Dell Dimension 4400; 20 GB HDD; 128 RAM; combo drive) to his brother-in-law and nieces. But first he thought he'd pay a technician to look it over and then get Windows XP for it. I convinced him this was economically unfeasible. I told him I could put Linux on it and it would be fine for them for the basic stuff.

I found out the machine wouldn't boot from the cd rom so I went into the BIOS and changed the boot sequence. Piece of cake.

First I put Xandros Desktop 2 on it, but had second thoughts because it has no firewall and is based on KDE...and no matter how much you tweak it, KDE is just butt ugly.

I had been using FC2 with few problems, but Core 3 was about to come out so I waited.

For me, FC3 has had all the charm of a cold water enema, but I figured some of my problems might be related to my ancient hardware, so I tried it on my nephew's machine.

Pretty much the same issues there. So I popped the first FC2 install disc in the drive and rebooted. FC3 completed ignored the boot sequence! It's holding the machine hostage. I tried several times, even shutting down and starting up again with the disc in the drive. I checked out the BIOS and the boot settings are as I made them.

So, what's the deal here? I'm sure it's something that can be resolved (though I about pee my pants at the prospect of some convoluted command line operation), I'm just ignorant.

Any tips?

Did you try creating a boot disk? What do you mean by held hostage? I don't really get the problem you are having. Can you describe it with words?

Thanks for your response.

The problem is that the computer will not boot from the cd rom drive since I installed Fedora Core 3. The BIOS is set to boot from the cd rom drive first, but since installing Fedora, this is ignored no matter how many times I restart.

Are you sure the CD you're booting from is a good boot CD that is compatible with your optical drive?

It sounds suspiciously like a bad CD.

Silly Question 1: The disk that you tried to boot from, it was cd1?
If so, try booting another computer from it.

Silly Question 2: During the boot sequence did the bios show any message like "Boot from CD-Rom"?
If not, check again the bios settings. I've got at least one computer that doesn't show that message though when there is no disk in the drive. You could always get really adventurous and disconnect the hard drive's power and then try booting the computer to see if it recognizes the CD-Rom. I would not hot plug the power if it does boot from the CD-Rom that way.

Silly Question 3: Does the CD-Rom's drive light illuminate during the boot process? Also, does it read from the drive after booting into any other OS?

Good Luck.