Noob Questions.

mojokat

I am a Linux virgin.

I have an old pc that the hdd died on, it was a windows xp comp. Asus mother board, 3gig op speed and 2 gigs of ram.

I have an old hdd that I wiped and formatted to NTFS and installed in the comp. 40 gig, ide maxtor.

I dl'ed the latest version of Ubuntu available from this site and burned the image to a dvd.

When I put the disk in and start the comp I get a message saying a bootable disk has been found

but then I get a message saying bootmgr missing (or not found I can't remember which exactly).

The hdd is good. I can put it in my windows 7 comp and use it no probs and all the files show up on the dvd. I have tried

burning the disk image a second time with a different program and get the same results.

Do I need to reformat the hdd to fat32 or am I messing up somewhere else?

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Lman

I'm pretty sure that if you're getting the bootmgr message, whatever Windows you had on there is overriding the boot from the cd. Have you checked your BIOS settings to make sure that your computer is booting the CD/DVD drive first?

mojokat

I changed the bios setting to boot from a cd/dvd before I tried to load up the first time. The comp is recognizing that there is a bootable disk.

As for windows settings, unless they are hiding in the bios there wouldn't be any I don't think.

I reformatted the hard drive twice just to be safe.

mojokat

I changed the bios setting to boot from a cd/dvd before I tried to load up the first time. The comp is recognizing that there is a bootable disk.

As for windows settings, unless they are hiding in the bios there wouldn't be any I don't think.

I reformatted the hard drive twice just to be safe.

raluxs

Another possibility is that the Ubuntu image you downloaded is corrupted. It happened to me once before also with Ubuntu. Could you try downloading it again and burn another disk? Or maybe try another distro?, I like Mandriva, the Mandriva One version is just one CD you can run live or install to hard disk. very flexible.

Good luck

mfillpot

To truly understand the cause for your error we will need to see the entire error message. Please post the entire error message of a picture of the screen here.

mojokat

The entire message is Bootmgr is missing. Press ctrl+alt+delete to restart. If I do that, I still get the same message.
This happens when the hard drive is formatted to ntfs, regardless of whether I try to boot from a dvd or the hard drive.

Currently the hard drive is formatted to ntfs. I used magic iso to extract the disk image directly to the drive and put it back in the other comp.
I set the bios to boot from the hard drive first, the cd rom drive second and it still says the bootmgr is missing.

I have disconnected a second cd/dvd drive so that the comp does not detect it while starting. When I am in the bios it is seeing the hard drive and the disk drive and there is only one hard drive in the comp.

I have tried formatting the hard drive to fat32 and booting from the dvd and also copied the files directly to the hard drive in fat32 format, while making to needed boot sequence changes in the bios each time so that whichever I am trying to boot from is the first choice.

When I start the comp and the hdd is formatted to fat32 I get a message saying please remove disk media and try again. This happen whether I try to boot from the dvd or the hdd.

The bios does not offer me an option to boot from a usb device and I don't have a floppy disk drive on my working computer so those are not an option.

saqman2060

Ok, your computer is trying to boot from the hard drive that does not have an OS on it. You need to get to a boot option menu to select the drive to boot from. This can be accessed by pressing "esc" or del or whatever the says press to get to a boot option screen. Even though you set the bios to boot from a cd/dvd, it still boot from harddrive by default. It happens.

When you burn the .iso to a cd/dvd media make sure that you burn the contents to the media not the .iso files. Burn the iso as an image.

To install linux you need to be using an ext file system, like ext2, ext3, ext4. Do not use NTFS.

Try these steps and tell us what happend.

mojokat

How would I format the hard drive to an ext file format? I thought I read somewhere that on install Linux would automatically reformat the drive.

Also if the files are already on the drive, shouldn't it boot from that or does it have to be from a disk?

saqman2060

When you install a linux OS you are given the choices of file systems to use. You just pick one and the system does the rest. If you want to format the drive without installing a linux OS then boot your PC with a liveCD and use one of the partition programs to format the drive.

The only way linux can boot your system is if the .iso was installed. If you EXTRACT the file from the .iso image to your drive, your system will not boot, the file from the .iso image must be compiled.

mojokat

I found a partitioning program to format the drive to ext3.

Should I be "burning the image to disk" or just copying the iso file to the disk. I burned the image to a disk originally and this is what I have been trying to use.

Should I try a different distro? I want ease of use for a noob but not one that is a windows look a like.

Also, what's the diff between gnome and kde versions?

saqman2060

You want to burn the .iso to disk. When you prepare to burn, choose "burn as image" or "burn contents of .iso to disk" options.

For noobs, try, linux mint 10, or PClinuxOS. Great for beginners.

Gnome is designed for lightweight systems and for ease of use. KDE is geared more towards programmers and developers who like stability.

I prefer gnome, xfce and fluxbox. Linux mint and PClinuxOS are gnome based.

marc

saqman2060 wrote:

KDE is geared more towards programmers and developers who like stability.

I'm sorry but I totally disagree with this description of KDE.

mfillpot

marc wrote:

saqman2060 wrote:

KDE is geared more towards programmers and developers who like stability.

I'm sorry but I totally disagree with this description of KDE.

I agree with Marc, to me KDE is more like the windows interface and gnome2 seems more like a Mac interface. honestly I want all linux based DEs to move away from replication and focus on something new and different from the competition which is why I like enlightenment and unity.

mojokat

On the off chance that I got a bad copy of Ubuntu, I grabbed Mandriva to try it.

With the hard drive formatted to ext3 and the image burned to disc it still won't boot.

From looking around the site a faq's and tutorials, I see that the files are showing on the disk properly. That is as files not an iso file.

I have set atapi cd/rom as first boot and disabled all others.

Start up ide scan does detect the disk drive.

On start up with the disk in the drive I now get...

Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press any key.

Pressing any key gets the same result. When I check the bios, the settings are as I left them.

Even though this comp worked fine until the hard drive crapped out on me, I tried changing the jumper on the disk drive from cable select to master but the results were the same.

Thank you all for your continued patience and attempts to help.

marc

mfillpot wrote:

I agree with Marc, to me KDE is more like the windows interface and gnome2 seems more like a Mac interface. honestly I want all linux based DEs to move away from replication and focus on something new and different from the competition which is why I like enlightenment and unity.

Well, the thing is that in KDE you can *CHANGE* almost everything whereas the others don't allow you to (or make it *difficult*)

As for mojokat

How are you burning the iso images?

Regards

saqman2060

marc wrote:

saqman2060 wrote:

KDE is geared more towards programmers and developers who like stability.

I'm sorry but I totally disagree with this description of KDE.

I understand that there will be some disagreement. And I do appreciate the corrections. This was my personal analysis of KDE. There are also some gnome based distros that look just like windows, very customizable.

As for mojokat, what program are you using to burn the .iso image?

mojokat

I have burned the Ubuntu files to a cd instead a dvd, thinking that might be the issue.

No difference.

I replaced the disk drive with a new one to see if that was the issue.

Now when I start the comp, it goes thru it's ide scan and sees the disk drive the same as it always has but I get a very quick notice saying a bootable cdrom has been found which I was not seeing before. However I still get the same masseage saying..

Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press any key.
Changing disks or rebooting does not change this. I even started the comp without a disk in the drive and waited for this message and then inserted the disk with no change.

This happens with all the disks I have burned and regardless of jumper settings on the drive.

3dvd's and 1 cd were burned.....burn image to disk,
1 cd was burned as make a bootable cd.
All get the same results as described above.

mojokat

I found an old red hat linux boot floppy that I had kicking around. I forgot I even had it and don't know if I could find the install disks.

The comp will try and boot from the floppy though. I'm pretty sure that my new comp doesn't have any way to hook up an ide floppy drive so I probably can't make one for Ubuntu. If I have to I will open up the new comp and see.

Could I install red hat, assuming I have the disks and then install ubuntu over top of that once i get the linux comp up and running?

Or I am making things way too complicated and should just give up?

saqman2060

Never give up, ever.

If you install ubuntu on top of redhat, then you will just be overwriting the redhat, you can dualboot them both that is an option. What we should do is post a howto on how to burn .iso to a cd/dvd so this will act as a guide for you.

mojokat

After much searching on Google I found that if I press F8 during start up it gives me menu options for which device to boot from. For me, the random numbers and letters choice is the cdrom.

It has detected the cd and is currently stuck at the Where are you? screen.

Hopefully I will have more positive progress to report soon.

saqman2060

What program are you using to burn the .iso?

mojokat

Nero.

In addition to needing to hit F8 it would appear I had a bad disk drive. I replaced it and Ubuntu is in the process of installing right now

mojokat

All is now working fine.

Thank You for all your patience and suggestions all who chimed in.

marc

mojokat wrote:

All is now working fine.

Thank You for all your patience and suggestions all who chimed in.

Glad you could finally install it.

Welcome to the linux world!

Regards

saqman2060

mojokat wrote:

All is now working fine.

Thank You for all your patience and suggestions all who chimed in.

Glad to have helped. And again, welcome.B)