I have downloaded mandrake 10 and put it on 3 discs. even though when i set it to boot from the cd it just goes into the normal start sequence. i have even tried booting using cd2 but this does the same thing. Is there a way of installing mandrake 10 by opening up the files on the cd itself ?

yes, use rawwrite on disc one while in windows. get a spare floppy, select cdrom.img which should be in cdrom/images and write that. that way you can boot from the floppy and it will give you cd-access

Also try booting the CD on a different computer to see if you can eliminate the CD as the culprit vs your computer. Have you booted of CD on your machine before?

Just an innocent question... did you just copy the file .iso to each disk? I mean, you didn't use a utility to burn image to cd or something like that...

It's true, I can't boot either... just spent 2 days downloading the CD images, burned them onto disk (yes, properly!) and can't boot from them at all. Strangely, I can't boot from the floppy either...

Very strange... I can normally boot from CD no problem, been mucking around with Knoppix, Debian and SuSE which all worked first time, but just experimenting with different flavours now I've got the linux bug again.

i did not realise there was a correct way to burn the data to disc i just down loaded mandrake 10 and burnt the disc as a data disc. was this correct or not ?

i did not realise there was a correct way to burn the data to disc i just down loaded mandrake 10 and burnt the disc as a data disc. was this correct or not ?

When you download *.iso files, those can't just be burned over onto the cd (ie: just put the .iso on the disc). The iso files are more like "zipped" files. You need to get CD burning software that supports "burn iso image" option. Off the top of my head, I know Nero for windows supports this.

i did use nero for windows and it was set on iso disc when i burnt it, and i have had no problems booting from cd before. i did try the mandrake 10 discs on another machine and that would not boot off them either.

I burnt my mdk10 CD with K3B in Mandrake 9.2 as iso. And no, the CD won't boot for me either. Tryed 2 different computers and one re-burn. MD5-sums check. I did not have this problem when I installed 9.2 (burnt with K3B in 9.1). will try the floppy method (omg I have no floppys!).. err tomorrow

can you use some sort of floppy boot to load mandrake 10 ? if so how is it done, yes i am a complete linux newbie lol

There is a guide on the first CD. "install.htm".

Ahhh. I found the solution in Mandrakesofts forums.

from: http://www.nutz.ch/content/texts/os/mdk10.php
Try to simply insert CD 1 an boot from it. this sounds stupid, and you're lucky if it works, but there is a fair chance that it just won't boot from the first CD. In this case you don't need to try to make a boot-floppy from the images on the CD, it won't work either.
Instead, boot from the second CD, it will then ask you where to boot from. Choose the CD-drive, insert to first CD into it and choose OK.
UPDATE: I took a closer look at the first two CDs. I found that CD 2 uses floppy emulation while the first CD doesn't. I guess that older mainbords (respectively BIOSes) fail to boot without floppy emulation.
Here is how to create a bootable CD1: You need all the files from the first CD, either copy them from the CD itself or mount the iso via loopback. Now open k3b (or any other burning-program) and make a new data-CD-project. Add all the files from the CD. Then go to Project -> Edit Boot Images. Click the New...-button and in the dialog browse to the files of the CD, open the folder "images" and select the file called "cdrom.img". Click OK and make sure that the "Emulation Type" is set to "Floppy". Close the dialog and burn the CD.