Hi, I am an extreme newbie to Linux. have heard alot about it but never had enough nerve to give it a shot. So now I have the nerve but am having no luck at all with installing it. I downloaded the Fedora 3 core DVD version and burned it to a Disc, I have my Hardrive partitioned for Linux, I used Partiton magic 8.0, I have set my BIOS to boot from CDRom, but when I put the Disc in and reboot my system I get nothing. I also have tried using the Disc set I down loaded from the same site with Disc 1 in at boot and nothing. any help would be greatly appreciated, I am really looking forward to join the world of Linux, but just can't seem to get the right ticket. Thanks

what do you mean, exactly, by "get nothing" when you boot?

are you sure you burned the distro .iso as an image?

did you verify the .iso? if not, instructions can be found here:

http://www.linuxiso.org/viewdoc.php/howtoburn.html

By nothing I mean just that, it simply does not boot to the DVD I burned and goes to my Second Hardrive that contains my Xp OS system.

hmm, i know my mobo will only look for a boot record on one Cddrive, do you have more than one? if so check which one it is looking at. Also some mobos have a manual boot device selector, like F2/del etc. for bios you hit F11, on my old board, and it will ask you what you want to boot.

Compuguy13, did you follow the link that Genesee posted? Since the DVD does not seem to be bootable, we are still wondering if you just copied the .iso file to the DVD instead of burning the CD from the image file. A simple way to check is to mount the DVD (presumably done if you're in XP) and use (in XP) "Explorer" to display the DVD contents. If you see one .iso file, you just copied it to the DVD. If you see lots of files, then your BIOS or DVD is not letting you boot from the DVD.

So, whisch case applies to your situation?

What i did was open the One file to show all the filesinside, and then burned them to a DVD. I did manage to install Feodra Core1 using a how to from the link. I have partitioned my second hard drive and am now going to try and put the Fedora Core 3 on the new partition.
Thanks for all the help, I really need it.

Ah, well, when you don't burn the whole image, you lose the DVD boot record (which is not normally visable when you "open" the image file). Like a HD, the "boot sector" of a CD/DVD is not "part of" the file system.

You'd be better off if you just follow the instructions and burm the iso image to a DVD. Then you'd have bootable "rescue" disk as well as an easier-to-use instalation disk.

It is still not clear. When you say "open the One file", does that mean you mounted the dvd on your windows machine and looked at it and saw multiple directories and lots of files, then you did it correctly. If you saw only one file and it was named something.iso, then you have only a non-bootable data disk. In windows, there are utilities that will allow you to "mount" an iso image as a "virtual" dvd and see the files inside, but the dvd itself would still not be bootable. You want to burn the dvd in image mode, exactly the way you would do the second half of making a copy of a cd/dvd on a one drive system (copying a the cd/dvd image to a file, putting the blank media into the drive, and then copying the file as an image to the blank media.) The downloaded iso file is the same as the intermediate file and is ready to be copied to the media, but you must be in image mode.

Sorry its been so long , been working 16hr days lately,Yes I saw multiply files which using Nero suite and the DVD setting, I burned to a DVD but it still would not boot from the DVD. I finnally used the instructions from this site and am now currently running Fedora Core1 updated. Thanks for all your help.