Hi, I downloaded the needed isos from Mandrake, I need to know what to do next. How do I burn the image to a cd. When i try I just burn the iso onto the disk, and my computer won't boot from it. I'm running Win XP (I hate windows) off of my new Compaq prosario 7550. I'm 15 so I suppose that means I'm new at this. I don't know about the rest of you. I've spent the last week trying to figure out how to get it to work. Any help will be much appreciated.

You will need a program like Fire Burner or EZ CD Creator, both will burn bootable CDs. I prefer Fire Burner.

You will also need to resize your windows partition. The disk setup tool on the install cds is supose to be able to do that ( I haven't tried it).

Welcome to Linux

How do I burn the cd image correctly. I can't get it to become a boot disk. What I get is a growing pile of coasters with the cd image on them. How do I get the CD to burn into a booter?

What burning program are you trying to use?

You will want to go into your burner program and instead of just burning a data cd, you'll want to choose an option "Burn Image." Depending on the program you're using you may have to rename the iso file (been a while since i've used windows but i remember in the Nero Burning Rom program I used i had to change the .iso file extention to .nrg or something like that). If you just make a data cd with the .iso file being the data it will not work, be sure to burn image. Perhaps you could post which burning program you're using and we can be of more assistance. After you burn the image be sure to check that your bios is able to boot from cd rom and also check the ORDER of the drives that it tries to boot from. (mine defaults to try floppy then try first hard drive. had to enable cd bootability and make sure that the order was floppy then cdrom then hard drive.) Good luck with it :-) Let us know if it worked or if you need any more help.

I DID IT!!!!!!!!!! My problem was getting the image to burn to the disk correctly. I downloaded NTI CD Creator. I got the image to burn to the disk and BAMM! I now run redhat linux.