quick DVD booting question

[Calum]

i just got a DVD of fedora 4 and now i want to install it. i have a dvdrw drive and a cdrw drive in my machine, but when i stick the dvd in the dvd drive, the machine ignores it as i boot up. the boot order stuff in the bios settings don't help, they are all windows device letters anyway, and none of them seem to imagine i might have a dvd drive installed. i think it might be possible to physically remove the cdrw from the PC to get the dvd to boot, but i would rather not do that, because i want all the hardware to be there when i install the system, that will be there when the system is running.

so...

how do i get the dvd to boot? i own a 64MB usb memory stick, if that helps, and this PC does have a floppy drive... the internet seems not to know a lot about this subject though, one page just said that if i couldn't boot from the dvd drive, then i would have to get the CDs instead, which i find very hard to believe.

[caveman]

Is the same type of problem I had (wasn't with Fedora though).

Maybe this helps.

The way the ISO is burnt onto the disc makes the difference.

As I don't have a dvd writer, I asked a friend to burn it.
He burnt it using Nero 6.?? on a winbloze machine - and it wouldn't
boot, everything else was there. We then discovered there is
a setting that says something like "track-at-once" or some such.
Apparently this have to be on, to make the writer do track zero as well?
to make it bootable.

Reburnt the dvd with that setting, and presto, it then booted thereafter.

Best of luck

[Void Main]

Hmmm, if what caveman suggests isn't the problem and it is actually a problem with your system (where it won't boot any disk) then you can also create a minimal boot CD (the new kernels won't fit on a floppy). There is a CD ISO image on the DVD that you can create a boot CD from. I know that's tacky but it may be your only option. I burnt my FC4 DVD with Nero (only because that was the only machine that had a burner in it at work where we have a T3 to download disks quickly) and mine burnt just fine. There is an option in the menu for burning ISOs. I don't remember what the settings were but I think I always use "Disk at Once" in Linux.

[caveman]

ahemm

Yes - now that I saw Voids' reply..
The default is track-at-once and you have to change it
to disc-at-once -
Not hundred percent sure... but shall try and find out - that is
if I can get hold of the guy that burnt the dvd.

Just know that one of those settings doesn't do what you expect
when burning a iso image.

[Calum]

excellent, i burnt boot.iso onto a cd from the dvd iso images directory, using DAO, and booted from it, with the boot CD in the cd drive and the dvd in the dvd drive.

no problems, am now posting using fedora.
like the look of it so far, hopefully will not have to go back to any debians for a while (nothing wrong with them, just they seem to want configuring quite a lot). next step is to fix the screen resolution (which is 800 by 600 by default?) should be easy enough, but i bet they have changed all the x configuration files since last i looked... (mumbles to self while shuffling off into distance)

[Void Main]

You probably already know this but there are GUIs to change your resolution or card/monitor configuration. They should be on the menu as "Display" and "Screen Resolution". I always set mine at install time.

[Calum]

i know, i know. i used those guis for the printer and soundcard just now actually (neither worked after install, but now both work after a quick gui-going over, with the possible exception of the printer, something to do with cups/lpr i think, not sure) but i do prefer not to use them, they seem fiddlier than opening a file in vi and just going for it. besides it took ages for me to find the right gui for the printer, and since i didn't install kde this time (daring!) i didn't have kcontrol and kprinter to fall back on (a gui i can kind of trust).

also, guis change, config files tend to remain the same, even this time with the xorg stuff instead of xfree86 i notice the syntax of the readable config files is totally comprehensible to me.

[Void Main]

Yeah, I know the feeling. I've had pretty good luck with the Red Hat config tools though for the most part (system-config-printer, system-config-network, system-config-display, etc). There are some exceptions. I still always manually edit httpd.conf and if I need a samba server smb.conf. I do edit the network files by hand also but I find the GUI (system-config-network) not to mess things up if used. I also use "chkconfig" and "service" commands at the command line rather than system-config-services (which also works very nicely by the way). I think for the most part they do work well though and should be a big help to n00bs.

config tools:

Code: Select all

$ ls /usr/bin/system-config*
/usr/bin/system-config-authentication  /usr/bin/system-config-nfs
/usr/bin/system-config-bind            /usr/bin/system-config-packages
/usr/bin/system-config-boot            /usr/bin/system-config-printer
/usr/bin/system-config-date            /usr/bin/system-config-printer-gui
/usr/bin/system-config-display         /usr/bin/system-config-printer-tui
/usr/bin/system-config-httpd           /usr/bin/system-config-rootpassword
/usr/bin/system-config-keyboard        /usr/bin/system-config-samba
/usr/bin/system-config-language        /usr/bin/system-config-securitylevel
/usr/bin/system-config-lvm             /usr/bin/system-config-securitylevel-tui
/usr/bin/system-config-mouse           /usr/bin/system-config-services
/usr/bin/system-config-netboot         /usr/bin/system-config-soundcard
/usr/bin/system-config-network         /usr/bin/system-config-time
/usr/bin/system-config-network-cmd     /usr/bin/system-config-users
/usr/bin/system-config-network-druid