i have been interested in switching from windows xp to linux for a while
well 2 days ago a friend of mine from a while ago was in town and he gave me a cdr with Mandriva GNome 2009 spring on it and he told me that the installation would be easy and blah blah blah i want to know if it's possible too boot from that disc to try it out without losing windows in case it doesnt work out

The short answer is yes. I'm not familiar the the Mandriva CD but if it's a live CD then it can run from RAM without doing anything to your HD. If you like it then you can later install it later. Even after installing on the HD any installation disk should recognise the windows installation already on the HD and allow you to participation you disk or disks so that at bootup you have a choice of which OS you want to run. If the Mandriva CD is NOT a live CD I would strongly advise you to download and burn a live CD iso and try it out first. There are a zillion of them available for the various distros.
Cheers,
jdk

right
well it's a cdr
how can i tell if its a live cd

Today, most top distros come on LiveCDs. None are written to kill Windows and install without confirmation.

Place the CD in the drive and reboot your PC. It should boot Mandriva, or a menu that gives the option to try it without installing.

Cheers

ok well i just tried the disc out
and good news is windows still works
bad news is first off it prompted me for username and password which it would not except
i tried logging in through the guest account
it pulled up the main background and the mouse image but nothing else
and it kept freezing
is it possible that my computer has enough ram too run xp
but not Linux?
again any help too any of these problems is greatly appreciated

Actually, it could be anything at this point. Post a list of your PC's hardware and we'll go from there. FWIW- it could also be a bad burn on the CD. If your friend burned it at a high speed, it may work properly on his PC but not yours. (computers can be finicky, too.)

ok well its an older computer
emachines d2823
325 intel celeron D processor
2.53 GHz
1/4 gig ram
has an aftermarket disc drive i installed about 2 years ago but i don't remeber shit about it and i've moved since then
by the way i even though my computer seems too have no problem keeping up with most 4 gigs
i do plan on upgrading it too two gigs of ram which is the maximum it can take

Maybe by Windows standards it's old, but it's still plenty fast enough for any Linux distro. (I have Kubuntu on a 566MHz Celeron w/256Mb RAM)

According to the Mandriva website, it should run on 256Mb RAM (that's the minimum), so you may have a bad CD. If your PC has a CD burner you can download distros yourself and create your own Linux CDs.

Cheers

yeah well isn't 256 Mb = to 1/4 gig
you know 256*2=512 512*2=1024 1024 MB=1GB
so then it takes ram to read the disc
and maybe doesn't have enough for the execution of the os
i'm out of burnable discs wait would a dvd r work
or a flash drive

Huh??

NEXT...

here's an idea, fedora has a nice to live-usb creator (provided your pc is new enough to boot from usb).

Yes, the maths are correct, 256mb is a quarter of a gig. And yes, it is possible that it wasn't enough for the execution of the livecd, but I doubt it. It could be the disk that is damaged, it could be your download (Its happened, its a ball ache having to download again too) it could be anything. Try putting it on a new disk, if you only have DVDs, put it on DVD.

You have rather a speedy processor for that little RAM, you know, you might try upgrading RAM.

Incidentally, what prompted you for a password? XP? Mandriva?

ok yeah i'll try burning to another disc
i think my roomate has some cd-r's stashed somewhere
and thanks for the advice on ram
i've been contemplating upgrading but i had no idea if the processor would be able too keep up
and i didn't want too spend the money for nothing
btw i tried it again to make some more info
first its all crappy pic ie: some little wierd color shit arrayed about 7x18 then a bunch of multicolor vertical lines before it prompted me for username password
and it was mandriva that prompted me for username and password

Yeah, those lines happen time to time, they're more an annoyance than anything- I think a few of my machines do it, it only happens when X starts, so I don't really worry about it.

Username and password is odd, does the mandriva website not tell you what to login as? If not, try 'root' or 'user' and a blank password,

ok i'm downloading the file
holy shit 686 MB?...
umm dude...
nevermind i guess my disc can hold 4.7GB
is DVD R ok?