going bonkers trying to install fc-5

[James Wilkinson]

Peter Horst wrote:
> Thanks for your reply, but I am not able to get to that point. The bios skips 
> completely over linux and starts booting windows. It's as if there
> were no boot cd in the drive at all.

Alternative option: do you have a USB disk you can use? If your system
can boot from USB media (most of them can, these days), you can use the
diskboot.img file to start the install. See
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/fc5/sn-preparing-media.html#sn-preparing-usb-media
for more information.

My usual comment here: sometimes with CD-Rs or CD-RWs it takes so long
for a drive to work out that there's bootable media there that the BIOS
decides to skip to the next bootable media anyway.

Very often, most of that time is taken by the disk spinning up, and the
drive working out what sort of media it is. But most drives will do that
anyway when you insert media. So if you can arrange for the drive door
to be closed at the right point of the reboot sequence, you can get the
CD to still be spinning at the right speed when the BIOS tries booting
from it. And then the BIOS might even decide it *can* boot from the
drive.

Hope this helps,

James.

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