Alright, first off . . . I am a total noob so please go easy.

I have decided that I wanted to attempt building my own PC. I bought a GOAL3+ SIS 761GX/965L Chipset PSB 800mhz board that came with the AMD Sempron 3000+ processor already installed. I also purchased a new case, that came with a keyboard and mouse (PS/2) along with a 380w Power supply. And for the hard drive, a Western Digital SATA 300 MB/s 320GB 16MB Cache. Oh yeah, the RAM is Buffalo DDR2-400 1gb.

What I want to do is install Suse 10.3 off of a bootable disc that I burned from the iso image. I know the disc works good because I used it to create a dual boot with XP on my laptop.

I'm able to format the hard drive from the disc supplied by WD. I can't seem to boot Linux from the CD and I keep getting the NTLDR error. This is a brand new hard drive with nothing loaded on it. What am I doing wrong?

I do have a spare hard drive that has windows 95 loaded on it but I cannot boot my system with this hard drive because windows 95 cannot accept 1gb or higher of Ram.

Any suggestions?

Sounds like you need to go into your BIOS setup and check the boot order. Just make sure the PC is set to boot the CD drive before the hard drive.

The other thing you might try is boot the CD on your laptop just to make sure its still good. I've had CDs I've burned go bad after a period of time and a few scratches.

BootingFromCD

First do what the poster above said, but make sure that you accept the partition plan that SUSE gave you (I believe it sets one up in custom?). This will allocate hard drive space for the appropriate boot settings.

Sorry, I forgot to mention that I had already gone into the bios to ensure that the CD drive was set to book first. The drive would boot the cd that came with new Hard Drive but not with the suse disc. I will try to burn a new disc and see if that works and let you guys know.

Thanks for the input!

Simple test - pull the hard drive out and boot the CD.
Some BIOS will boot a hard disk if they find a valid loader - regardless of the boot order; usually can force a bot selection menu by something like the F12 key during initial boot.

That NTLDR not found message usually comes from the boot sector record; that implies your WD formatting installed a M$soft loader record.

Hey there,
I had simular problems trying to format my new hard drive when using SuSe. Here are a few tips... First format the hard drive using the supplied mainanance disk using the NTFS file system for Microsoft Windows XP. After the format, insert the boot cd for SuSe 10.3 and when you get to the partition editor, make sure you do a custom partition edit.... You want to delete the windows partition, because there won't be any use for it after the install.

When setting up your own file partitions remember you must have a /(root) Partition, /home partition, and a Swap Partition. go to http://www.opensuse.org to find out more about setting up file systems.

remember that you have to Format the Hard Drive with your maintenance disk first.

I always wipe the partitions off first, remove the win boot loader and format the partitions using http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ if you can boot from CD or http://www.aefdisk.com/ if I have to boot from a floppy. Then proceeed with the distro installation.

Ok, couple things. I am stupid and was using a CD/RW drive instead of a DVD drive to try and read the DVD installation disc. - Needless to say, problem solved.

I have a new problem now. The computer would be installing SUSE just fine. At one point in the middle of the installation, the screen freaked out and there were vertical lines going through the display. So, I shut off the computer, let it sit for a few minutes and restarted. This time, same thing. I shut down, restarted. Now, the computer will turn off all by itself after a few minutes (1-2 minutes) at various points in the installation. Even if I don't try and install SUSE and instead go into the BIOS, it will shutdown. Is there a problem with the motherboard/cpu? I don't have a CPU fan installed, just two case fans - 1 - 80mm and 1 - 120mm.

Doesn't sound good. Been years since I last ran a box without a fan on the CPU.
Heavy (CPU) load can cause systems to shut down randomly - even with a CPU fan. Reasonably common complaint on the gentoo boards as compiles can run for several hours. Answer is usually to get more air moving around the box/laptop - I use a desk fan. I doubt it'll be concentrated enough in your situation.
Maybe check the BIOS to see if you can adjust the temperature sensor ranges - may expose you to burning out the chip though, so I'm not recommending it.
Best bet would be to get a CPU fan.

Thanks for everybody's help. I've got it all up and running now.

Glad to hear that it is working for you.