Can't boot to the Debian CD

[alfalfa]

I was wanting to try Debian, so I downloaded and burned both the current stable version and the up and coming "woody" release. However, my machine refuses to boot to the CD. It boots to Mandrake 8.0 and Mandrake 8.2 CDs just fine. Any ideas? Thanks :D

[Dave2001]

Any error messages ?

David

[alfalfa]

Thanks for responding. I'm still very new to Linux; I've had my "Linux box" for 4 days. No error messages, the machine just booted to the hard drive. I changed the Bios to boot to cdrom first, and it boots automatically to the Mandrake CDs if they're inserted, but just skips over the Debian one.

[Acidkewl]

i am having the same problem with my slackware 8.1 CD but my comp was fine booting from my redhat 7.2 CD =\

[Dave2001]

I actually had the same problem with Mandrake CD's .
Did you had a chance to try it on another PC ?

David

[alfalfa]

Hmm, how odd. No I only have one PC to try it on. Mandrake 8.2 is pretty cool for a noob like me, but I would like to check out something else too. BTW, these are disc images that I downloaded, not the official CDs from the Debian store.

[Orcs_ate_my_box]

I know this sounds kind of lame, but I have had similar problems before. This doesn't sound like a hardware issue. . One way around this I would venture is to check and see if you can make a boot floppy. There should be some images that you can use that will fit on a floppy disk and then use the floppy to boot and see if the install will proceed from there on the CD. If you have never done this before, it is usually done using software called rawrite (if your doing this from DOS). In most distros it can be found in the dosutils directory on the CD. I have also had software change the order in which my machine booted. For example, I like to boot off CD too. And for some reason, something changed my BIOS settings so that it was booting off floppy first and then the hard drive and lastly CD. Check your BIOS. If your cdrom drive is listed last, it will just boot of the HD or floppy if it finds something bootable on those.

[sarah31]

Did you just burn the iso file or did you burn the iso as a bootable image? If you just burned the iso file that will not boot you must first change it into a bootable image.

[alfalfa]

Thanks for the respones. sarah31, you hit the nail on the head. I mounted the iso image (didn't just select the compressed file) and burned the mounted image. I was then able to boot to CD. Of course, that didn't mean I could get Debian to work for me, because it stubbornly refused to connect to the internet to download packages. Back to Mandrake for a while I guess, since I know that I can get it working that way. Sigh. But at least now I know how to burn a bootable CD for the next time I have a chance to tinker. Thanks!

[sarah31]

Were you unable to connect to the internet ? Unable to config your connection? Or your sources.list was giving errors? If you divulge a little more I or others may be able to get you on your way.

EDIT: Oh and what kind of connection? Dial-up? DSL? Cable?

[alfalfa]

Hey that'd be great! Ok, I have a router, actually an AirPort base station that connects to the internet for me via PPPoE (DSL). I have it set up to port map to a manually configured ip address. The base station takes my real ip address as assigned by the DSL modem and then assigns the client machines some "false" ip addresses using NAT. Anyway, I configured the setup in the Debian install just as I did in the Mandrake one, where the computer has the manually assigned ip address that I've port mapped to, and the address of the "gateway" is the address of my base station. By the way, the computer in question is connected to the base station via ethernet cable. So when it came time to select a method of retreiving packages after installing, I kept getting errors (wish I could be more specific here, I just can't remember), but something along the lines of "file not found". I tried selecting several ftp and http sites, turning off the DSL modem and base station, then turning them back on, and even going directly from the modem to the computer via ethernet cable. No dice. So I installed Mandrake again, and it just worked with the same configuration. Hmph! Any ideas? Thanks