"LiveCD" visual aides please.
 

greetings, I'm a very visual learner and have to admit that I'm not sure of the vocab needed to search for what I'm trying to figure out. So here goes my legit dyslexic expression.

Wanted to get back into the Linux OS realms for more then one reasonhowever; GF's business PC crashed so hard one night that the HDD isn't recognized by microcrap now... partition magic8 shows me that the HDD will respond but, from the data recovery pages I've seen - I have a shot at fixing the MBR. The tangented to the googling (ALOT) that there are these neat "LiveCD's." they are linux based and all your supposed to have to do is download the ISO's and burn them to CD and then set the puppy in a rom....set the bios to boot CD initially and then it'll go right to GUI mode. my DOS/text mode is super rusty. I want to learn but, unfortunately I can't spend much time working in the linux learning curve as the HDD needs partition fixing soon... I hope to have it done within the next 2 weeks or sooner. after that ... THEN I can ease myself back into the realm of a dual boot systems .
So, Does anyone have the ability to post screenshots of the list of what's supposed to be on a LiveCD? Like "This is the folder and file structure of the burned CD" kinda pictures.... The two that I have downloaded and burned and tried to work thru are Knoppix and Insert.

I noticed a few comments on looking with the .MD5 files to check the ISO's for proper file size status... where are some screen shots of this or what the specific key words one needs to use to see what success will look like in GUI format -(big sigh) YEs I'll be in XP to look at this stuff.

Side note/back history FWIW I had two cases of serious carbon monoxide poisoning in 2004 and 2005 driving them 18-wheelers so my memories of the linux newbie days I had in college from 1997 to 2002 where I was joyfully learning mandrake and Redhat as well as 98lite stuff too life was fun.... unfortunately I'm drawing a big fat black screen in my minds eye with regards to searching the help/FAQ's and MAN files aimlessly. So visual aides are best...links to them are second best, and i'll hope for no 'trudging thru pages and pages of text just yet... maybe next month when this problem is fixed ... the partition is ressurected and her PC is pseudo healthy again then I'll feel comfy wading thru the MAN files etal.

thanks in advance.

Checking md5sums is something that is typically done from the command line, both in Linux and Windows. If your iso is on your desktop, you open a terminal and type:

md5sum /home/username/Desktop/(name of the iso)

In windows (if the iso is right under C: ) :
- find the "run" option on the menu
- type cmd
- OK
- cd \
- md5sum (name of the iso)
Note: windows does not natively support md5sums; you would first have to download a little md5sum application from the internet and place it in the same directory as your iso

In both cases, the command line will return a string of numbers and letters. This needs to be compared with the md5sum that can be found in the place where you got the iso (some md5sum file). If there are multiple isos, make sure you go for the md5sum that matches your own. if the two are identical, you have success.

BTW , why do you need to know what is on the cds? I'm afraid I don't see the point of this.

mbr
 

for fixing the master boot record, boot a windows cd to the dos prompt and type "fdisk /mbr" remove the disk and reboot the computer. If you have linux already installed will have to re-post on the forum to get instructions on getting the lilo or grub boot loader re-installed