Hello,

I am new to Linux and look forward to installing and playing with it with my ultimate goal is to create a dual boot on my desktop with my ultimate goal in becoming 100% Linux/Unix user.

okay, here's my problem and the steps that I took:

1.)downloaded the following to my WinXP desktop "rhel-5.1-server-ia64-dvd"
2.)burned it to a DVD disk using Roxio Creater9 XE as "Data Disc" and "Make Bootable"

3.)went into my bios and changed the boot order to see my USB CD/DVD Rom.
and restarted....

I get a message that says "...boot from CD?" and I hit Y for Yes. CD Rom seems to do something but just hangs.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Thankyou

Welcome to LQ.

Adding a "windows boot sector" to a DVD with a copy
of an image will not work.

The " .iso " file is an image, and must be burned using
an option 'burn an image' or 'burn as an image' .
Then it will be bootable.
( And do not use the option 'make bootable'.)
.....

And you do know that RHEL 5.3 is the current and that 5.1 is rather old .

Also I would point out that RHEL requires a license, installing it without a license leaves alot of stuff out and really is just not worth it. You might consider getting Fedora or Ubuntu instead. Fedora is what RHEL uses and quite a number of the people that work on RHEL also work on Fedora.

I do not know your cd burning software, but usually the option would be something like burn iso to disc or something like that, sounds like you probably just burnt a copy of the .iso file to disc rather then burning the image on to the disc... if you get my meaning.

Since Centos is RHEL with the logos removed and (unlike RHEL) is free to install/update, you might want to consider it. Each version of Fedora is only supported for thirteen months, after that there are no updates of any kind. RHEL/Centos has a five year (plus) support life.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions, it seems to work now. By the way, I'm going to go with CentOS and try that out for now.