Boy, am I itchin' to try out Linux. Unfortunately, I can't, so far. My PC won't boot any live CD that I throw at it. I have made sure BIOS is set to boot from CD first. I have downloaded and bit-torrented multiple copies of both Knoppix and PCLinuxOS. I have burnt the .isos to disc with nero at the slowest possible speed (4x is the slowest option for my drive).

So I slap one of 'em in the tray and reboot. PC shuts down, etc, reaches the initial (pre-windows) boot screen, and tells me "booting from atapi cdrom".. hangs there a couple seconds while the cd drive whirrs to life.. and then boots into windows! I get this result no matter which disc I try.

Am I having a hardware issue? Am I burning bad discs?

Any help will be most appreciated.

are you burning a data cd-rom?
check for an option on nero that says 'burn iso image to cd' or something like that I don't really remember.

k3b rules..

Yes. For example, the only file on my most recently burnt disc is "pclinuxos-p92.iso". File is 679MB in size.

hey man, you burned a single file onto the cd! you need to select the menu option 'recorder' -> 'burn image' thats atleast what neroLinux does. after burning the iso image correctly, you will have a lot more files on your cd. think of an iso image as a zip archive, one file that contais a lot more, though an iso images also contains data such as bootable data for the cd, etc. go burn your live cd's again, and thistime dont select 'data cd' and dont just burn the single file. you really need to select the menu option 'brun image' or something along that line.

Okay, yes- you have touched on a subject I was wondering about. I need to understand the meaning and importance of multiple files bundled with a distro. Alright, please tell me this, then.. if I go to PCLinuxOS's website, to the download area, I find the generic .iso (and a couple of .isos taylored to specific nvidia drivers) along with ONE single file that seems to coincide with the generic .iso. This file has the extension .asc. As I understand it, this is just a text file meant to verify the validity of the .iso file. There are no other files to download! What am I missing?

If you burn the iso as stated by nathanael, it should work. If you just burn the file (as a file), you have a file on a non-bootable CD

heh. heh heh. Haa! Hahaha! Ooohh! WHEEEEEEEEEE!!!! Now posting to this thread via Firefox under PCLinuxOS!!!! Yes, I am a dummy. I was not burning image files! Thought I was. Boy, am I retarded. Thankyouthankyouthankyou. Honestly, my deepest gratitude.

hope you really enjoy linux !
see you at the forum!