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-   -   First Time Poster Installing Suse... bad disk? (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/suse-opensuse-60/first-time-poster-installing-suse-bad-disk-410010/)

surfsteve 01-31-2006 10:14 AM

First Time Poster Installing Suse... bad disk?
 
Hi everybody. I am new to the forum and this is my first post. I just got my copy of Suse yesterday. My CD can read the disk but I can't get it to install or boot from the CD. No matter what I do my system always reboots with windows.

I have two hard drives, one with everything and one that has only windows on it and would like to install Suse on that drive. I can read the readme files that came with it but my computer is really messed up and wont open PDF,s so I am unable to open any of the files that explain how to do this.

Everyone is telling me that I should just be able to put in the CD and have the computer boot from it just like I installed XP. I don't see any .exe files or anything familiar on the disk that I can run like in windows.

I also have mega spyware and wonder if there is something spyware related keeping me from installing. Is it possible I have a bad copy, or do I just not know what I am doing? What about reformatting the hard disk will that help?

Please help.

Steve.

JamesMay 01-31-2006 10:34 AM

Check bios boot order?
 
Hello,
You didn't say if you checked the bios settings, but make sure the boot order in bios checks the CD before the hard-drive. That way if there is no CD in the drive, bios will simply proceed to the next device in the boot order.

If there IS a bootable CD in the drive, it will boot and run from that CD.

Typical boot order lists are:
Floppy
CD
Hard Drive or bootable raid card in either order.

Good Luck,
J.May

RedShirt 01-31-2006 10:36 AM

Well the thing about most computers is that they don't boot from CD first. In the bios a little thing called "boot order" or "boot device order" is usually set something like this by most manufacturers:

FDD
HDD1
CD
Other Drives
ETC

While this works great for installs on a blank disk, it doesn't help much once you have a boot device set like a hard drive and wish to boot a CD first.

You probably just need to change the order to something more like:

FDD
CD
HDD1
Other Drives
ETC

Some bioses...biosis... I never know... anywho somve versions of a bios also have a little "boot temporary device" or similiar option. This means you hit a different key, like F2 or F12 and can temporarily set CD to boot first.

surfsteve 01-31-2006 11:42 PM

It turns out I ordered the wrong disks got ppc instead of x86.

Should have the right ones pretty quick.

surfsteve 02-01-2006 12:18 AM

When my new disks come will I want to boot off my D drive and install it there or my C drive and tell it to install on drive D?

I'm thinking both ways would probably work and that I should try booting off C: first and see if it lets me install to D: because that's the kind of guy I am...

RedShirt 02-01-2006 05:55 AM

That's up to you... Are they 2 physical drives? Or a different partition on the same drive? So long have it it setup and ready for the boot disk to install it, you can do it to a different partition or drive, and either way you will make it dual boot automatically.

FYI in Linux there will be no C or D... It will be hda, hdb or if sata sda, sdb for seperate drives. For different partitions it will be sda1, sda2...etc.

surfsteve 02-01-2006 09:50 AM

I have two physical drives and can boot up primary or secondary. My plan so far is to install it to the secondary drive for evaluation and eventually have everything on one drive and use the other one as a back up.

I got a feeling I'm going to love Linux.

My main concern is EmacSpeak. I am a terrible reader and have been using Readplease since 2000 and swithched to ReadingBar last year. Using my eyes only it's tuff to read 20 pages in a day but I can easily listen to 200 pages.

Even if EmacSpeak is close to as good as the old Readplease 2000 I will be a Linux user for life. To my knowledge EmacSpeak is the only text to speech program that will work with Linux. I am wondering if it will be included as a part of my distribution of Suse.


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