I'm a newei, a bit old man. I downloaded "debian-504-i386-netinst.iso" and burnt it to a dvd. When I boot the machine with the CD in the drive, Win Xp still starts and nothing happens. How can overcome this. N.B. I have a quit limited technichal knowledge.

Welcome to LQ!

How did you burn the file to the disc? Did you just copy the file to the CD and hit "burn"? If so, that's not the way to do it. You need to use a piece of software that burns a .iso file to a CD properly. A decent program for this is ImgBurn. A .iso file contains everything that would be on a CD/DVD, including the filesystem. When you burn the file straight to the disc (rather than using a CD/DVD image burner program), you're bypassing that filesystem, as when the disc is burned, a new one is created with just the .iso file in it.

Is your computer set up to boot from the cd drive ? Do you have your XP install disk ?
If you do, put that in and reboot. If the computer boots from the cd then you should do as MrCode suggests. If it still goes direct to your normal XP, then you have to either make a change in your BIOS or find the boot menu.

If it does boot from the cd with XP, don't do anything except take the cd out and press Ctrl+Alt+Del

You don't say anything about your system, what make, motherboard etc. Find that out and we can help you more.

Thank you Mrcode. Thank You smoker.
My machine is a custome-made and I have a genuine win Xp-home ed with SP2 install disk which I used when I first got the machine to install windows. Then I recently re-installed it after my hard disk got corrupted and a technician fixed a new one (Seegate sata 160 GB)for me .I just put in the install CD in the DVD drive and started the computer During the first steps I partitioned the HD into C (60 GB), E (20GB), and S(60 GB) putting in mind that I may need a separate partition for debian O.S.

Some information about my machine I find in "control panel" - :

computer
ACPI multiprocessor PC
Disk Drives
ST3160318A6
DVD/CD-ROM drives
HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H12N
IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers
Intel(R)82801G(ICH7 Family)Ultra ATA Storage Controllers-27DF
Intel(R)82801GB/GR/GH(ICH7 Family)Serial ATA Storage Controller-27C0
-------
Processor
Intel Pentium D CPU 3.40 GHz
Intel Pentium D CPU 3.40 GHz
------------
--------------
Mrcode,
I burned the file on the disk by using the software "Nero" provided with the "LG" DVD writer. I'm going to try the method you mentioned and let yuo know.

Assuming your BIOS settings have not been changed since then, that tells us Smoker's guess (BIOS setting / boot menu issue) is not the problem and MRcode's guess (burned the .iso to CD incorrectly) is the problem.

The Linux installer will need to create the partitions for Linux. You cannot use a partition you created in Windows to install Linux. I can't tell from your description whether you mean your disk is big enough that after those three partitions there is enough left to install Linux, or whether you mean you intend to use one of those three for Linux.

Most Linux installers are able to destroy and/or shrink Windows partitions in order to make the unpartitioned space they will need for creating the Linux partitions. But Linux doesn't name partitions the same way Windows does, so you will not see C, E or S partitions in a Linux partitioning tool.

If you want to destroy a Windows partition to make room for installing Linux, you may be better off doing that in the Windows XP disk management program rather than in the Linux installer, so you are sure you don't have any important files on the partition you will destroy, and you know for sure which partition is which.

There is also a limit of three "primary" partitions if you intend to have any "logical" partitions (four primary if you have zero logical). Your Linux install will probably need at least two partitions and Linux doesn't care whether they are primary or logical.

So if you are keeping three primary partitions for Windows, you should not add another primary partition. Instead make the rest of the disk after the three primary partitions into one "extended" partition. All the logical partitions are then made inside the one extended partition.

Nero has two different ways to write a .iso to a CD and Imgburn has the same two ways. One of those two ways in each program is correct and one is not, and we are assuming you used the incorrect one.

I don't know Nero well enough to tell you the UI actions needed to select the correct way.

For ImgBurn, look at the screenshot here showing the ImgBurn main window:
http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=screenshots
The two ways to write a .iso file to disk from that Window are

Correct: Write image file to disc

Incorrect: Write files/folders to disc.

Imgburn would let you write a .iso to CD using the incorrect "Write files/folders to disc" because a .iso is a file, just as Nero apparently let you write the .iso using its generic write method for any type of file or folder. But you cannot boot a CD that was written that way. To write the CD so that it can be booted, you must use the write method that is only for .iso files, not the write method that is for any kind of file.

Maybe ...
The last time he booted from a cd, there was no hard drive boot available. There is such a thing as a boot order.
Rubbish. You can use a partition created in windows. Linux will reformat it, that's all. And your 3 primary partition limit is crap too. The limit is 4 and any further partitions must be logical within one of the primary (or "extended") partitions. You need to create a primary extended partition to be able to create logical partitions within it.

Edit : the 4 primary partition limit is per disk too.

Hi all
Thank you all very much. Good news, Mrcode's advice worked. I burnt the file image to the disc using "ImgBurn" and once the burning finished and the cd ejected, it receeded back and every thing went on -to my surprise- automatically. I'm using debian's web browser right now. I'm quiet grateful to all of you and especially to Mrcode.

Now I have some issues remaining. During the excitment of installing Debian, a note appeared saying that this edition of debian is for 32 bit computers and that my computer is a 64 bit that can function better with another eddition of Debian, but I continued on. Does that significantly matters other than it tooks a long time to install?.Does that slow my system?

Another issue, I intended to keep windows XP as well as debian on my machine. I understood during installing that the dual booting can be done by some configuration later, but I do not know how to do that. Actually I do not know if Windows XP is still there?! and I'd love to know how to make my machine "dual boot" both system on putting my machine on and then chose one of them. I do have the Win Xp istaller disc and I do not have important data left on the HD before installing Debian.
Thanks alot

How much RAM do you have? If it's under 4 GB, it shouldn't be too significant.
Open a terminal and type Copy and paste the output here.

For most home uses of Linux systems it does not make a significant difference. Whether it makes a noticeable difference depends on what programs you tend to run. In reasonable ranges of ram size (about 1.5GB to 12GB), contrary to what you'll see in many posts, the ram size should not be a significant factor in choosing a 32 bit vs. 64 bit OS.

The home Linux use most likely to have a noticeable improvement in speed if you switch to 64 bit, is video file format conversion or recompression. But even for that, I don't know of any convincing controlled experiments that clearly show 64 bit is faster.

Most Linux installers automatically detect Windows XP and set up dual boot for you. I don't know about the installer you used.

Most Linux installers give you the choice whether to wipe out everything there before or whether to leave it all and just use the unpartitioned space to install Linux. I don't know whether you got that choice, whether you understood it, nor what you chose.

As bratmon suggested, we need to know what your partitioning looks like in order to give you constructive advice about that. The output of fdisk -l should tell us what we need to know.

Installing Windows after Linux would trash the connection of the Linux boot code to the MBR. So if you do need to reinstall Windows, after doing so, you would need to reinstall the Linux boot code, which must be done while booted from your Linux install CD. For the install CD you chose, I'm not sure of the process for reinstalling boot code. Hopefully some other expert here can tell you. Or more hopefully, you haven't trashed Windows when installing Linux, so you can just add a few lines to /boot/grub/menu.lst to make Windows a choice when booting.

Thank you Bratmon. Thank you Johnsfine. I feel embarassed, but as I stated in the begining of this thread, I do have very limited technical knowledge however I do love to learn. Actually I do not know how to open a terminal window and I'm trying searching the help topics with no use till now. I would be gratful if you let me know how to open a terminal and I'll tell you what information I get if I succeeded. Thanks a lot

Are you using a different computer for posting to the internet? Or did you figure out how to run a browser in Debian?

I usually advise beginners to select easy distributions such as Mepis, rather than harder such as Debian, and I advise selecting the desktop KDE vs. (what I assume you have) Gnome.

You demonstrated my meaning by getting stuck on something very basic. It is hard to learn the interesting parts when the basic mechanics of getting started aren't obvious.

But it still shouldn't be too hard to move forward from where you are.

Assuming you have chosen (on purpose or unknowingly) Gnome as your desktop, you can read about some of the basics here:
http://library.gnome.org/users/user-...enubar.html.en

The terminal program should be pretty easy to find in the Applications menu.

If running Gnome Desktop with screenshots
http://yatsite.blogspot.com/2008/10/...find-what.html

Thanks Johnsfine
I'm running now Debian and I do use now "Epiphany Web Browser" to post to the internet and in writing this reply now. I'm going to follow the link you wrote as well. Thank you for your patience and your time.

Woo, I could opn the terminal I entered what what Bratmon asked me to do. Here is the output:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x13aa13a9

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 19127 153637596 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 19128 19457 2650725 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 19128 19457 2650693+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

I guess you misunderstood some choice in the Linux installer and effectively told it to blow away the previous contents and then use the whole disk.

So your Windows partitions are gone.

I expect you don't want to reinstall Linux again (after reinstalling Windows) because install is slow with a net install rather than more complete copy of the CD and also you might just make the same mistake again.

So you want to shrink SDA1 to make enough unpartitioned space to reinstall Windows. Then install Windows, hopefully without blowing away Linux. Then reinstall the MBR portion of the GRUB bootloader (because installing Windows made Linux temporarily unbootable).

That is a sequence of steps each a bit harder than might be appropriate for an extreme beginner.

To resize SDA1 you need to boot again from the Linux CD. In many other Linux CD's I could tell you how to run gparted once the CD was booted. In the CD you have I don't know exactly how to run gparted nor whether that is easy to do or very hard.

Once you're running gparted while booted from CD, it is pretty easy to shrink SDA1.

Then you would boot the Windows install CD. As with Linux, there will be a choice of whether to blow away the previous contents or use the unpartitioned space. If you get that choice wrong then you flip flop back to Windows with no Linux.

But even if you get that right, the Windows installer will break the Linux bootstrap and you then need to reboot the Linux CD to repair the Linux bootstrap. I have no idea what command you use on that Linux CD to repair the bootstrap and you ought to find that out before you reinstall Windows.

Another choice is to download a .iso file for a more beginner friendly version of Linux, such as Mepis. Use your current running Linux to burn that .iso to CD.

Then you could start over with an ordinary install of Windows first and Mepis second. Or you could keep Debian installed, follow the main instruction I gave above, but use the Mepis liveCD instead of the Debian install CD for running gparted and for repairing the Debian boot.