Inital install woes...no inital boot off cd. HELP!!!

Guest

I am tring to install this on an former win 95 machine. I'm not sure if I did this right but here goes.....I ran fdisk wiping out the dos partitions. Used the format to format but it only formated to fat16. I tried to boot off the cd for gentoo but it does not see me cd at all. I can boot using to dos using a start-up floppy from win98 but this seems like the only thing I can do. Am I missing something here? Why isn't it booting to the gentoo cd? My system admin used this same cd on 4 other machines no problem. Should I install win 98 so I can at least see whats on the disk? Please Help!!!

TheWart · Posted: Sun May 26, 2002 3:49 am Post subject:

Have you been able to boot off of a cd before? You may want to go into BIOS, and make your cdrom the first or second boot device. Also, use the fdisk that comes with Gentoo, but what you did will be fine, as long as you 'redo' it.
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Face it, we are all noobs.

On the box it said it was designed for Win XP or better, so why won't it work with Linux?

Guest · Posted: Sun May 26, 2002 2:34 pm Post subject:

Actualy I have never been able to boot off the cd. When win 95 was installed the cd worked and I could access data. For getting into the bios, the esc key doesn't work. Upon startup using the boot floppy which did not come with the machine, all I get is the Acer flash screen. I cant even see the gentoo cd now to get anything off of it.

ElCondor · Posted: Sun May 26, 2002 2:52 pm Post subject:

with many bioses used by bigger companies, the [del] or [ESC] button do not work, you should try [F2] during the boot-messages of the bios, this works with sony and dell, too.

* ElCondor pasa *
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Here I am the victim of my own choices and I'm just starting!

Guest · Posted: Sun May 26, 2002 9:11 pm Post subject:

ok, that worked. I now have the bios set for cd boot ok. Well, it still doesn't boot off the gentoo cd. Am I missing something? I have seen people talk about this lilo. Should I get that? If I do get it, how do I get it to a floopy so it can be bootable? I am going to check the acer site for a bios update for this machine. It is an acer Aspire running v2.0 bios. Any other suggestions?

magoo · Posted: Sun May 26, 2002 11:09 pm Post subject:

FINITE · Guru Joined: 10 May 2002 Posts: 449

You should be able to use a win9X boot flopy and execute the isolinux.bin file from there. The flopy should load a driver for the cdrom allowing you to cd to the isolinux dir and then just typing ./isolinux should do it (I THINK). Worth a shot right?