I have successfully installed Red Hat 9 on a windows 98 and 2000 computer. When I tried to install on several Windows XP computers it simply would not boot from the CD. I already went into setup and put boot from CD as the 1st option. It seems like its trying and then just gives up and goes straight to XP not to Red Hat installation screen. I am a newbie to both Linux and XP. Is there some setting in XP I need to change. My red hat floppy boot disk did not work either. Please direct to right thread if question has already been answered elsewhere.

I'm a newbie myself. I'm working with XP Red Hat 9 as well. I also did what you did (set CD as second option after A) and it booted ok into instalation screen. Are your CD's ok? maybe you could try them on another machine?

I would second Yowl's suggestion that the CD might be bad. If no valid boot information is found on the CD the system will attempt to boot from the other devices it has set, so finds XP and loads it for you.

Welcome to LQ both of you. I think this is the first time I've seen two first posts where one is answering the question of another.

Jamie...

my confusion is that i used the same set of disks to install on the Windows 98 and 2000 computers and everything worked fine but on several XP machines in a lab none would boot from the CD even though I changed boot sequence in setup.

the same thing sometimes happens to me even though i have GRUB installed, but then i just use the boot floppy... works beautifully!! try that.