Hi all
I am trying to dual boot windows on one of my boxes, the problem I am having is that no current live cd's will boot to desktop so that they can be installed on a spare hard drive I have added.

The CD's all work and have been used to install to other hardware, the cd/dvd is working ok (reading and writing) have even tried 3 rescue cd's with the same results.

the common theme between some of the failures is that the booting freezes when nouveau is mentioned in the boot up script. could it possibly be my nvidia graphics card (gts450) again, but it will usually boot to a desktop at least (without windows being installed)

any ideas gratefully accepted as I am running out of them

cheers
Stripe

Most cds have safe boot option when booting up. Try that.
If that does not work then use 'vga=791' for a simple boot.
Hope this helps.

Do ordinary installations work without livebooting?

Does a live usb also act the same way.

I agree on both ideas above, can try any or all.

yes, kind of..
I know on my home machine I can't run any LiveCD/DVD distro (Fedora, OpenSUSE..) but when I insert installation DVD it installs OK GUI environment (KDE4.8, Gnome3).