I have windows 2000 installed on one partition, and a blank fat 32 partition on the same drive. A friend of mine gave me a burned copy of mandrake 8.2 and the extention cd. My bios supports " boot from cd". When I boot my machine it says Boot from CD_, but it dosent do it. Eventually it just loads windows. Now if I put the extention CD in and boot, it boots to a linux window. which says something like " You are trying to boot by secondary means insert boot disk, but it locks up the machine at that point. I have read a few w2k and linux dual boot tutiorials, but this issue never came up. I thought that the cd was bad, because in windows you can't explore the cd, when you try to access the cd it says, invalid function. But if you put the second cd in it reads it just fine, the second cd being the one that it will also boot off of ( well if not boot it will do something anyway). I thought that this may be a possibility, but i really don't know anything really and I 've read that allot of people have broblems dual booting with w2k.

You most probably got a coaster on your hands, ask your friend to land you originals (whatever he/she used in the first place to install linux), and install from them.

Obviously the CD1 was made with Easy CD Creator WITHOUT the proper procedure to it bootable. I just use Nero to do it in 3 clicks.

Since you cannot see individual files on CD1, it was burned incorrectly. That's a common mistake, in either EZCD or Nero.