Ok, I need some help. I am trying to put together a HTPC:

Pentium D 930
ECS C19ASLi MoBo
2 x 512 MB Ram
Geforce 6800XT
Seagate 160GB HD (IDE)

HD is master on IDE-1 and CD drive is master on IDE-2.

Everything appears to be working fine until I try to boot Knoppmyth CD.

I get:
Boot from CD:
1. FD 1.44MB System Type-(06)
Starting Caldera DR-DOS... (pauses here for several seconds)

EMM386 3.27 Copyright (c) 1992, 1998 Caldera, Inc. All Rights Reserved
EMM386: Warning: Address line A20 already enabled.


At that point it hangs up and I am forced to power off and restart. This is my first build and first linux attempt. I would very much appreciate any help or suggestions. Thanks!

So you have a blank HD, have your system BIOS set to boot from a CD, and you are booting a KnoppMyth CD that has passed the MD5 checksum???

Yes. Yes. and yes. HD is brand new. The CD is set to boot, and spins up as though it is trying. And MD5 checksum was good. I burned a second copy with the same issue, and also tried R5B7 distribution with the same issue.

Well I would say to run the testcd option but if your KnoppMyth CD isn't booting I don't think you can.

I had burned a CD with version R5C7, which booted and installed fine, then I got some stupid error when I restarted and the system login wouldn't stick. It ended up being a bad burn.(link to that http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10578)

Anyway, I had no idea how you are getting since you should be booting from the CD anyway, you could either remove your floppy drive, or make sure you don't have it setup when you boot from the CD.

Also, this doesn't make any sense
because as far as I know Knoppix is Debian, unless Caldera made the ISO Linux boot info that Knoppix uses.

Unfortunately, I can't run anything until I get the CD to boot. I don't have a floppy drive installed and it is removed from the BIOS as well. I put in the boot CD that came with the hard drive, and it booted just fine. I think tht it either must be a hardware issue of which I haven't been able to define, or something with the way Nero burns a bootable disk. Unfortunately, that's the only burning software I have access to.

Hi truckerfire,

Sounds like you may have burned your KM cd as a data cd instead of a bootable iso. Check your burner settings.

Mike

Hm, I would have never thought of that, normally when I make a data disk I just get a stream of 1s and 0s, same as booting to a drive without boot partition info.

I guess each motherboard handles each differently, anyway if you can't get a bootable burn from Nero, you can always try something simple like Magic ISO or Power ISO, which Magic ISO tells you if the CD is bootable before hand, you just need to finalize it when you burn it.

Just to be absolutely clear, the provided file is a complete ISO image, which is bootable all by itself. All you should need to do is a raw burn onto a CD. You do not want any other file system wrapping, just a bit by bit copy of that data onto the CD media. Look for the menu option to burn a previously prepared ISO image onto a disk.

I got it figured out. I kept burning the disk as a bootable disk. After digging through Nero menus, I found an option to burn image. Loaded up this morning with no issues. Thanks for all your help! Now I have one good disk, and about 15 coasters. Tonight when I get home I'll finish up my install.