Hi!

I am posting here sooner than I expected, but I have run into a problem....

I am new to Linux (or I am trying to be) I've been listening to the Linux Reality podcast trying to catch up for about a week now. I am anxious to get started using Linux!

I downloaded a bunch of iso's for several distributions on my Mac and aburned a few live cd's for the PC. I saved my files off the PC and defragged the harddrive just in case I decide to install over my windows partition, or want to repartition the drive.

I changed the boot priority in the bios to E, A, SCSI. I am now trying to boot off the cd's, and so far I can't. I tried first with the edubuntu desktop cd, and then decided perhaps I did something wrong. Puppy has a "this is how you know your iso burned right" page, so I burned a Puppy cd and tired again.

I watch on bootup and the machine recognizes both CD drives, but it still boots straight into windows.

I don' t know as much about this PC as I normally would - it was a $40 doorstop when I got it. Windows only tells me it is a "Genuine Intel - Intel Celeron Processor" with 256 MB of ram. I have no idea where that falls in the scheme of processors... the last time I paid attention to PC hardware was when I had a 486. The guys I got it from could not get windows 2000 to install due to hardware restrictions, so it is running Win 98.

I believe it only has one HD, which is in 2 4GB partitions. They said something about limitations in what kind of HD I could install, but I don't recall if it is a motherboard or a windows limitation. Honestly I didn't listen very hard at the time because I thought I'd just be getting rid of the machine once my Mac was fixed.

So.... if the bios says it can boot from drive E, it SHOULD be able to do it, right?

In your BIOS is there an option for boot from cdrom? Do you have a 3.5" floppy disk drive?

I thought I had chosen that option - my CD drives are E: and F: in Windows, so when I chose E, A, SCSI for the boot order I thought I had it. Turns out I was wrong. After going on an education goose chase after the Intel Boot Loader I determined my network card dows not have flash, so that could not be the problem.

I just got distracted by Windows naming the drive E. Once I went back through all the choices, it is now set to CDROM, A, C and all is well.

Oh, and yes, I do have floppy drive

Thank you!!

I was going to suggest the making of a 1.44" floppy boot disk in the abcence of a cdrom boot option in BIOS. Great to hear you have it going Happy Linuxing

I have moved your thread to Linux-General as it was in our intros section.