Hello, my question is fairly simple.
Someone at my office loaned me three cd's labeled "Redhat Linux 9.0" which evidently they had used to install the OS on their winXP computer. I couldn't take the cd's home however, so I inserted each into my drive, selected all files on it, and copied it onto a folder on my hard drive. I thus had 3 folders, each containing the files from each CD.

When I got home, I burned 3 cd's, each from the 3 folders I had created. However, the CD 1, which from what I've read in help files about installs, should boot my PC if I've configured the BIOS to boot from a CD before the HD, will not boot!

My question is: What most likely did I do wrong in this procedure, and is there any way I can use these cd's, re-burn them, etc. to make this work.

Thanks much!
Adam B.
arb_colorado@yahoo.com

You should have made a one-to-one copy to preserve certain things needed for the cd to be bootable. To make a one-to-one copy in Windows, use software like blindwrite ( www.blindwrite.com ) to make an exact image of the original cd, which will then be burned to another cd later.
If you have good cd burning software, you can make a bootable cd from the files you copied. Bootable cds work by by pointing to an image of a bootable floppy. If you have an option in your burning software to make a bootable cd, it will ask where this image is. It will be one of the files that was on the first cd.

Yea you have to either do a direct copy of the cdrom, or burn the CD with a bootsector file in order for it to boot. However to just to save yourself another CD, go to the "images" directory of your CD1 there should be a bootdisk.img file, write it to a floppy disk(you can use winimage, www.winimage.com) then use it to boot to the redhat installer instead.

Just copying the files did not make the 1st CD bootable.

You can use the CDs you have burned if you have a working floppy drive. Create a boot disk using the rawritewin program on the 1st CD in the /dosutils directory. The disk image is in the /image directory and I believe it is called boot.img.

Ok - thanks for that help. An issue still remains, however.

I made a BOOTABLE CD, and it worked properly, booting my machine to the Linux installer. However, when I went through the install process and selected "Local CD-ROM" as the option for files to install, I got a message saying that the installer could not find the Linux CD in any CD-ROM drives.

I know that my CD now has identical files to the other one... do I need to name it something specific, do anything differently?

I would just download ISO's and go from there, but I only have dialup access and that option is *out*.

Thanks!