Linux installation problems

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

A good friend of mine is trying to install Linux SUSE 10.0 on his home computer (a Pentium IV 2.93Ghz 512MB RAM Windows Home Edition SP2 machine), but the install isn't working. He wants to keep Windows as a backup OS (poor misguided feller), but he can't get the installation to work.

He downloaded the installer from opensuse.org (x86 architecture) - whatever that means, but the site says so), unpacked it and burned it like ordered by the site. Furthermore, he left the first disc in the drive and rebooted, after which the installation should begin, and the computer does make a conscious effort, but Windows bludgeons it into booting it up instead.

I told him that you guys could probably help him, so here's his plea. You can post (possible) solutions in this thread (duh), but you can also send them directly to his email address, puistius.giganticus at gmail dot com. His thanks in advance.

[parabolize]

Change the boot order in bios so the cdrom is before the windows hard drive. If its got windows x86 is the right architecture.

Remember to backup and defragment windows before the install.

[gigapuist]

I've got the same problem to (actually I'm the friend of Strategia_In_Ultima). and when I change the boot order of my PC (by pressing ESC when he just started and you see the screen with your desktop-builder, in my case HP, on it) my PC do some effort to read the disc and then he starts windows or he says that he cant boot the disc and he asks for pressing a key to continue booting from the hard disk (which means windows)

[Will]

Sounds like bad media then. The disc image should have had either an md5 or a sha-1 hash with it. Check that the hash of your downloaded file actually matches what it is supposed to be. Then, when you burn the disc, there should be an option in your burning software to verify the data after the disc is complete. Then it should probably work (unless there is still a problem with your boot order).

--edit: Ok, I just read the post again, and it looks like you are never really going into the BIOS. For a lot of OEM computer makers, they have a splash screen at startup that covers up the normal post messages, and usually hitting Esc kills the splash and shows the machine posting. This is not the same as going into the BIOS editor. There are different ways to get into BIOS from the post screen, I have seen it as F2, F11, F12, and Del before. Basically what you should get is a menu that comes up, and the machine will not be booting into any operating system until you exit the menu. That means that you should not be seeing the windows boot loader, where it gives you the option of choosing a windows partition, or what mode to boot in, with a timer that will automatically select for you. What you should be seeing is a screen where you edit the system clock, information on processor and memory, detected IDE/SATA/SCSI devices, etc. One of the options should say something like "Boot Order" or "Boot Drives". It will list your floppy, your optical drive, and your hard disks. You want to make sure the optical drive is BEFORE all the hard disks. Save and exit, and it should boot from the disc at next startup.

[gigapuist]

which burning software (open source, free if possible)do you recommend (in other words: which burning software does verify the data you want to burn) I suppose the burning wizard of windows XP does not make sense (it says it is based on roxio software)

and another thing, I can't find a map with the name disc image
but ther are (when I use the windows-search-machine) 26 MD5SUMS files. does it means that is okay

[Will]

For a CD, the disk image will be a file with a .iso extension. This is the file that you will be burning with your burning software. The burning software that came with your drive would be the best to use, since other programs may not have complete compatibility with your burner. Try looking in advanced options or something similar, to see if you can set it to verify discs.

The files ending in md5 should be plain text files that you could open with Notepad. It will contain a string of 32 characters, 0 thru 9 or A thru F. You would compare this string with the output of a md5checksum utility. You can find a program to compute this here (linky). You would run this program with the ISO name as an argument, and it will print out a 32 character string. If they match, you have a good download. If not, you need to download again.

If you have problems with doing the above, I would suggest getting one of the more "user friendly" Linux distributions (Ubuntu/Kbuntu/Edubuntu are favorites for many) and playing around with the LiveCD first, before installing. Also, get a book for beginning Linux users, so you can get a better feel for how things work.

[gigapuist]

Thanks for the help Will. I know now what to do and what the problems wwre. (when I burned a dvd version of suse my software stopped and gave an error while it was verifying)

Here another question: can you install kubuntu 6.06 on a pc with only a live cd (because I have a live cd of kubuntu and I like the OS) or do I have to download and burn the instalation disk?

by the way is kubuntu 6.06 very different to suse 10.0?

[Fyron]

kubuntu and suse are quite different. The kubuntu installation CD is a live CD. I'm not sure if they make any live CDs that you can not install from. There should be some sort of install button on the desktop, or at least in the system menu.

[parabolize]

"The Desktop CD runs a live desktop directly from the CD and can install to your hard disk. The Alternate CD includes a text based installer for low memory, LVM or RAID installs.

The DVD contains both Live Desktop and Alternate installers, as well as the other packages in our main archive." - http://www.kubuntu.org/download.php

Actually Fyron I don't think the live cd could install to the hard drive until the last release.