Novice's question:
I downloaded the 3 CD 586 Mandriva 2006 set via BitTorrent and burned them to CD using Windows XP CD writing wizard. I then set the Bios to boot from a CD, loaded CD1 and started the machine. It wouldn't boot from the CD. I tried two downloads and 3 CD burns ust in case something was screwy, but to no avail. My machine is a Pentium 4 1.4GHz with 1GB RAM. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

XP can not natively create CDs from ISO images. If you look at the CD1 I suspect you will see just a single file.

Lacking Nero or Roxio here is a free utility. Other free ones can be found by googling.
http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

Thanks, I used Nero and produced a working disc image straight away.

Any Windows installation should have CD burning SW that can handle .iso files.

As the man said, you have to create the CD from iso--that is an option in most burners. (I now have quite a few CDs with one big *.iso file on them.... )

Once you've done the burn, if you check the cd in windows you should see lots of different files. If you only see one big one, then the burn settings were wrong - if you google for burning iso's with nero you should find something that gives you the correct ones - It does work, I managed to do that before I dumped windows altogether.

Oh and you should also google for md5summer and get a copy of that app - before you burn the iso's, check the md5sum numbers with md5summer - it will confirm the accuracy of the download(s) (and yes you'd need to get the md5sum files from whichever mirror you downloaded the iso's from for the comparison).

regards

John