Problem generating a bootable CD

[charlesnadeau]

Hi,

I've downloaded the stage 1 of Gentoo 1.4rc4 (http://mirror.gentoo.gr.jp/releases/1.4_rc4/x86/x86/livecd/gentoo-basic-x86-1.4_rc4.iso) from my local mirror and burned it on a CD. I used 3 different CD burning program (Nero, EasyCD Creator and BlindWrite) and every time the files were burned properly (no i didn't simply burn the .iso file on the CD) on the CD but when I try to boot with the CD, I get the message "Operating system not found". The 2 PCs I tried to install Genntoo on are an HP Vectra XA and an HP Vectra VL 5/166.

I burned the Gentoo CD the same way I burned my RedHat CDs but I can't boot with it. Is there something I did wrong?

Is there a simple way to boot with a floppy and then switch to the CD? I saw a couple of different ways to do it on this forum but they didn't seem very strait forward. Basically, what I want to do is to replace RedHat 7.3 by Gentoo 1.4 on two of the PCs I have at home.

Any help will be welcome!

Many thanks!

Charles
_________________
Charles Nadeau
http://radio.weblogs.com/0111823/
http://charlesnadeau.blogspot.com/search/label/Gentoo

[peterst]

Hi Charles,
I had a similar problem to this when trying to boot the Gentoo cd from an old notebook, the bios would try to boot from the CDRom and then fail with cannot find Op sys.

I got around this by using SMB boot manager loaded onto a floopy, and just setting it to boot fromt he CD. Seems to be the simpliest method as the SMB isntall is a dos exe.

Regards,

Peter

[charlesnadeau]

Peter,

Thanks for your reply. After a lot of time spent trying various ways to boot, I managed to boot using the latest Slackware boot disks. It wasn't straitforward but I made it and am now awaiting the end of the KDE compilation.
I took extensive notes and will probably soon publish on my blog an "how-to" derived from my experience.
Thanks for your help!

Charles
_________________
Charles Nadeau
http://radio.weblogs.com/0111823/
http://charlesnadeau.blogspot.com/search/label/Gentoo