NUBIE to alternate OS world-Install

[Fritz Whittington]

On or about 2004-01-05 17:03, Ian Desjarlais whipped out a trusty #2 
pencil and scribbled:

>Weeks ago I downloaded the RH Linux 9 ISO's and was clueless.  Yesterday I
>downloaded and burned the three ISO;s for Fedora, and not much has changed... I
>have laptop running XP professional on a double partitioned HD (1/2 is XP, 1/2
>is unformatted)  I tried to boot off of the first ISO and nothing happend
>except windows booted.  I then tried imaging the boot floopy, but it was larger
>than 1.4 mb...it didn't fit.    I also have no clue how to run  a shell prompt
>to check the   MD5cheksumthing or other.  Here I now find myself asking for any
>help that peopel may give.  
>
>IanD 
>  
>
Sorry, but it has to be asked ;-)

When you put the boot CD into your drive when running Win XP, and look 
at it using My Computer, do you see just one file on it named 
<whatever>.iso?  If so, then that's your problem.  Probably not, since 
you talked about trying to image the boot floppy, but I had to check...

Probably, your laptop is set to boot off of the HD only, or at least 
before trying the CD to boot.  You need to verify, using the BIOS setup 
utility, that the computer will try booting from the CD before the HD.  
Exactly how you do this varies a lot from one brand of laptop to 
another, so you'll have to figure that out.  Perhaps on the 
manufacturer's web site, if you don't have any other documentation.

It might be helpful if you could find another machine that you somehow 
*know* will attempt a boot from the CD, and if you can get that to boot, 
run the "verify CD" option. 

-- 
Fritz Whittington
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. (George Bernard Shaw)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3497 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20040105/1b33f005/attachment-0001.bin>