I just downloaded and burned Mandrake 9.0 iso's. I went to restart my puter to start installing, and low-and-behold, i booted into windows. I changed the bios to boot to the CD. Still nothing. What do i need to do? Do i need to some how extact something.


Please help. I hate windows and really want to get into Linux, but this is driving me nuts and is a real turn off. There isn't anything on Mandrakes page that I could find that was contrary to what i am doing.


BTW: I have a Celeron 1.7 Ghz, proc., 256MB RAM, and a new Intel MoBo.

THanks much.

One thing, are you sure you burned the iso images to the discs, or did you just put the iso FILES on the discs? That's a common mistake for anyone who hasn't burnt a cd from an image before. Don't know if that helps.

I think thats what i did. what do i need to do? I don't have a burner(I used a friends), is there anything I can do?

Make sure you make the CD bootable, too. I've made that mistake many times before.

Something Else I thought of. I have an extra HD with virtualy nothing on it. If i DL the images there, can i install from there?

If you wanted to do a Linux From Scratch system, you could. But you'd need an existing Linux install to do it with.

you have to make sure that the cd was burned as an image. Load up the windows, and explore your cdrom. If it's only one file (distro.iso) you burned it incorrectly. if its a bunch of directories and files, you're ok. if the cd is ok, but you still can't boot, check your cd for instructions on how to create bootable floppies. you can then use these floppies so the installation boots (which then uses your cd)

2 questions:

1. How do I get the images? All i see at the FTP's are .iso files.

2. if i DL the images onto "d:\" and install it on "C:\", would that work?

Unfortunately, you have to burn new CDs, which means you need your friend's burner. As a consolation, you won't need to download the ISO images again since they're sitting on the CDs you made earlier.

On the Windows-side, I'm familiar with Easy CD Creator. To make a CD from an ISO image, you need to:

1. Select File -> Record CD From CD Image.
2. Select the ISO format in the drop-down box
3. Browse to where the ISO file is stored on the machine

The Mandrake distribution's first CD is bootable. So using the defaults when you burn the CD should be sufficient.

If you use a program other than Easy CD, then there should be a "Record from image" option somewhere.