[ever_thus]

I finally took the plunge and downloaded Mandriva 10.something (the free edition). I then burnt the image onto a bootable DVD. When I put the DVD in my drive, if Windows is running, it goes crazy until I eject the DVD.

If I boot from it I get into a program called DR-DOS, which seems to have all the regular DOS commands. I can see from it that the disk has the right stuff on it, although I can't tell if it has everything it should. I can also tell that the disk is bootable, as I don't get DR-DOS when I insert a non-bootable disk.

My question basically is, how do I install the OS from this DVD. An issue may be that BIOS (and DR-DOS) think the DVD drive is a CD drive. BIOS shows its size as 700MB and DR-DOS tries to load MSC100 (or something like that), which, if I remember correctly, is Windows' driver for CD drives. However, as I said, nothing seems to be missing from the DVD.

Help would be greatly appreciated. I have lots of experience with both Windows and DOS, but none at all with Linux. (In fact that's what I'm trying to get.)

[tribalsun]

Two ways to do this:

1) Burn the CD ISO's to CD's
2) Burn the DVD ISO to a DVD

Either way you choose make sure you burn the image to disc and not make a data CD or DVD. As stated use the appropriate media for the appropriate ISO images. Always boot to the CD/DVD, do not try to run them from within Windows.


Mandrake 10.1 Official CD/DVD ISO's

[ever_thus]

I don't know what my burner did. Is there any way to find out? Plus, if it was the ISO image that was burnt, what's the next step?

[tribalsun]

Refer to your burning software help files on how to properly burn an image to disc.

If your going to use the DVD ISO then you'll will make only 1 bootable DVD using the single DVD ISO image.

If your going to use the CD ISO's they you'll have 3 CD's using the 3 ISO images you must download and burn.

Chuck you original DVD that failed on you and start from scratch.

[ever_thus]

It'll be painful, but that's what I'll have to do. I assume that when I have the DVD properly written booting from it will take me automatically to the install application.

[tribalsun]

Yes.