Hi folks.

As a newbie, i am experimenting with an old Compaq Deskpro, PIII @ 500MHz, 192Mb RAM, floppy, hd0=10Gb & CDROM. The final goal is to get away from Windows possibly to SuSE...

After some failed attempts at setting up onboard sound with Ubuntu Edgy, a few adventures with several Live distros, I finally decided to go with Kurumin, hoping that my mother language would help, and it's running fine, although i still have a lot to learn...

However, I want to install SuSE 10.2; Downloaded and burned all 5 ISOs, but the machine doesn't boot from the CD nor the boot floppy described in this article, even though the BIOS settings are correct to boot from floppy, CD and HD, in this order.

Following that article further down, when I try to copy the two booting files onto an "untouched" partition, i get stuck with permissions issues and don't know what else to try...

Any ideas, please?!?

so how did you install the other distros without boot media such as a cd ?

Could the SuSE CD1 image gotten corrupted and rendered bootless?
All other distros I've tried booted nicely from the LiveCD, and after booting, it was up to me installing or not, but they all did boot up...
Only SuSE is playing tricks....

could be.

you can get the md5 checksums for the iso files here:
http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/dis...iso/cd/MD5SUMS

then just run this and compare the numbers.

Could you have burned the image file as a file instead of as an ISO image. Put in the first disk and see if you see a /docu and /suse directory. If you see a single .ISO file, it was burned incorrectly. Since you have installed a different distro before, I'm assuming you know how to do it correctly; I'm just saying to check for an accident, which can happen to the best of us. Also, the disk could be bad. Can you see if it boots on another computer? Running the checksum on the disk should tell you if there is a problem. It might be a simple as cleaning the disk of smudges. Maybe the drive itself is going bad. If it boots on another computer, maybe borrowing a usb external drive for the install might work.

I remember jumping on WindowsXP forums back in 2002 looking for answers, and it was nothing like this in Linux... Thanks folks, for your quick and useful answers.

Robert, Yes, the ISO file got corrupted somewhere down the line, as the CD doesn't boot in any of the other 5 machines I have here; I am now downloading the ISOs again

Jschiwal, thanks for your concerns... It happened to me burning the iso file and not the iso image, so this time I did burn the image, and although the CD is defective, i can navigate through folders and files. The fact that this particular CD doesn't boot in any other machine confirms it is bad.

However, I am still limited to WinXP on the access to these pages, and now let me ask how do I get a md5sum on a burned CD? I am using LQ's "md5summer" which I tested with another iso image I had here and the checksum did match against the values on the site, which tells me the program works for ISOs, but when i attempt to checksum a whole CD i get a single md5sum for each object in the CD...

Going back to my first post on this thread, one thing still puzzles me: On the article mentioned, there is a chance of booting the little pentium3 with some special floppy, which took me a few hours to come up with, and in the end, that floppy is also useless... I can boot with a Win98 floppy; Once logged onto Kurumin I can see two files in that floppy, but it also doesn't boot... How about that?!?

Anyway, don't worry too much about the floppy; I am now downloading the 5 ISOs again, and as soon as I have (good) news, I'm coming back.

Cheers

Oh, silly me...
I just realised I downloaded (and burned ...) the ppc versions and not the x86 intended for the test-machine in question !
Jeez, sorry guys...
I got a lotta downloading to do now.