I have a pentium 4 tower pc that stopped working recently, it will get to the login page and wont go any further.

As i have nothing of too much importance on that pc, is there a way to get rid of everything from the hard drive and install linux bearing in mind i am kind of a newbie to all of this.

I hadnt recently installed any new hardware so its probably a problem with windows or one of the programs (it was not connected to the net so cant be a downloaded virus)

If this is possible can someone point me to which distribution to use and where i can download it.

Also if his just seems like a bad idea, then tell me



Thanks for your help



edit: installed hardware includes a dvd drive, a cdrw drive and floppy drive

Welcome to LQ

My personal thoughts on this would be that you should re-install windoze, assuming that is the OS you currently have. At the time of install, leave a certain amount of space unpartitioned or unformatted, or at least seperate from the large partition you will install windoze to. Then, feel free to install Linux to the second partition and learn from there. This will allow you to continue using your PC in your familiar environment while learning Linux.

Cool

Hi would but i don't have anything to reinstall windows with, didn't come with any disks when i bought it. I don't mind if i have troubles as i can do fine without the other computer for a while, thats why i decided i might try linux.

I have this computer available so even if i get completely lost in linux and am not able to fully use my other PC for a while i will be fine

Oh and Thanks

well, you can just go to

http://www.linuxiso.org/

and d/l the distro of your choice - instructions on md5sums and burning are on that site as well - Mandrake might be a good choice with regard to newbie-friendliness, but here's a good starter guide to picking a distro:

http://www.distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

once you burn the distro, make sure the BIOS is set to boot from CD, and boot with CD inserted

be sure to bookmark this site, as you will probably have a question or two after that

good luck


PS: great install documentation is available free on the mandrake and redhat sites, among others....

If you want to get info on your components, display settings, and general Linux compatability I suggest burning a Knoppix , and perhaps a Mepis CD and booting them first.
You can practice all your moves without touching the hard disk, including network connections and web browsing to learn even more. On such a recent computer live distros will run nicely.

I would also like to suggest that you definitively determine that the reason the computer does not work now is a software issue and not a hardware issue. Nothing is worse that spending a HUGE amount of time and effort trying to get linux to run only to find out that The HD, mem, or motherboard was borked the whole time.

Yes I speak from experience ;-)