Little experience except some Red Hat 4 or 5 years ago.

I am trying to boot from a CD, but I can't seem to follow instructions.
Every version I have tried seems to be one file and the instructions I have read require multiple files for a boot CD. I assume what I want is contained in those files, but I don't know how to separate them.

I tried Puppy 3.1, Slackware 12, and now Ubuntu 7.1.

I'm operating an AMD 64 2 4200 with SATA 500G in the primary drive (Windows XP media edition) on an ASUS M2NBP board. I just want to dual boot once I'm installed on the HD.

Thanks in advance
Ken

This should help;
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/answers/LQ_ISO

What are you doing? I can't tell from your post.

Have you downloaded an .iso and you want to burn a CD or DVD of it and then install linux?

Burn the .iso to disk, not copy it to disk. if you wind up with one big .iso file on your cd or dvd then you did not burn it to cd or dvd, you are just copying the file to it. Should have a file tree with lots of files when you are done. Nero or K3B etc. all have burn .iso image to disk options. That is what you want.

Or are you trying to make your own bootable cd. Then you will need a boot image.

Or you downloaded the .iso to hard drive and you want to install from there? You can mount the .iso loopback but you can't have a mounted file system and install at the same time.

Edit: comprookie2000 you beat me. I was daydreaming.

You need a program to burn a .iso file to a CD properly. If you are using Windows, you can get ISORecorder (http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/). If you are using Linux, you need to run something like

# cdrecord -v -eject speed=16 dev=ATA:1,0,0 <filename>.iso