im a total n00b. i cant get anything to install. this is my problem,

This is my first time ever installing anykind of Linux OS on a computer. A friend told me Whitbox is very simple and my best bet. I'm installing it on an older computer. E-machine w/ intel celeron 600mhz cpu and nothing else very special about it. hey, free computer you know?

anyway, I deleted all the partitions on my 120gig WD HD (all 8000 mp3s included :\ ) and I'm about to write zeros to it.

I have no luck what-so-ever at begining this install.

at first i was getting missing NTLDR error when I tried to boot off hte CD

then I downloaded a bootdisk: bare.i (was this even needed?)
and it would hang at a "freeDOS" promt.

So this is where I am at. I have the .iso ready to install, but they arent installing and my BIOS is set to boot from the CD-ROM first.
whenever I try to use a boot disk to possibly get started it also doesnt seem to help.

I'm kinda lost here, please help guys!!

Uhh,

Well, you boot off of the CD-ROM. If you can't- you make a floppy image from the "images" directory on the cd. Normally the cdrom.img or boot.img file. Use winimage or whatever to write it. dd if on *nix.

Boot to the floppy, with the cd in the drive and begin. It will format the drive for you, so what you did wasn't really necessary.

For a newbie install, whiteboxlinux is not what I would recommend. Whitebox is a cloned RedHat ES Server based OS. Which I'm guessing, you don't know much about. Servers, I mean. In any case, not to sound like a cliche'- but you been hoodwinked.

The easiest install would be Suse or Mandrake. Both are freely downloadable. You can tell which one's are most popular by looking at the www.distrowatch.com site and scoping out the ratings.

So, that's how it goes. No matter what you install, if you can't boot off of a cd-rom, you will need to make a bootable floppy from the floppy.img or cdrom.img or boot.img or whatever. Good luck.

The Whitebox Enterprise Linux developers take the freely available source RPM packages from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to compile their own binary packages in hope that the resulting packages are the same as or close to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition to that, they need to create ISO images, too, and create bootable first CD which starts a working installer.
NTLDR is not Linux, but Microsoft Windows. You should not see anything like that when booting the CDs.

I doubt that. Sounds very strange. The distribution is accompanied with documentation, isn't it?

This doesn't sound right either. You should not need to use DOS bootdisks at all. Just get ISO images or regular Syslinux bootdisk images.