[lynch]

It doesnt matter what OS you have on your computer;you can always boot with a dos or win9x bootdisk as long as your boot device sequence in bios is set to floppy as 1st boot device.
Did you check your boot device sequence in the bios?
Is it set to boot from the CD drive 1st?Just because the CD auto-starts in XP doesnt mean your CD drive is the 1st boot device.
If you re-burned the disk and it asks if you want to install, the disk should be okay.
Did you do the md5 checksums as suggested by 5amYan?
If you can start rawrite all it wants is a boot image(which should be in the /images folder and called cdrom.img or boot.img)and the destination drive.That would be A:
Good luck
lynch

[trevor1]

boot sequence is cd rom hd 1 and them something else (a buncha letters).
so in win xp choose to explore the contents of mdk disk 1 and look in a certain folder for \images\cdrom.img
cool or not

[lynch]

[trevor1]

do i have to change my boot sequence?

[lynch]

If you plan to boot from a floppy,then you must put the floppy drive 1st in the bios boot sequence.
lynch

[trevor1]

ok,made the boot floopy and it went to the instalation!
ok made it through all of the steps untill partitioning my hdd
how do i keep my windows and have mdk
my hdd is 37gb i have 26.8 remaining
maybe 20 to win
and 17 to linux
but i hit resize and it sez it wil lose all data on the partition and thats not what i want!!!

[lynch]

WTG on the floppy!
I'll assume you have aborted the installation until you get your partitions right.
Have you formatted the whole drive for XP and it has only taken 10GB so far?The resize option should resize windows xp without losing data-it just makes it smaller.
But you must be sure to run scandisk or chkdsk and be sure to defrag the xp partition also.DrakX and DiskDrake see a fragmented partition and warns you that all data will be lost because the files in xp are scattered around the drive instead of them being in a contiguous area .Run scandisk and defrag and try the resize again.
The best way is use PartitionMagic 7 or 8 to non-destructively resize the partition.
If you know someone who has PM 7 or 8,they can make a set of floppies to run the program without having to boot xp.
Stick with it,trevor1.You're almost there
lynch

[trevor1]

ok so defrag and it wont tell me i will lose all data on the drive.
i dont have to use pm to partition my hdd without losing data do i, but i can use the installer to do that right
P.S thankyou so much for all of this help i would have givven up long ago if it werent for you!!

[lynch]

NP
The installer will resize your windows partition to a size you indicate without any loss of data.You dont have to use PM;just a suggestion.
Here's a page I found that may help:
Drake 9 install-partitioning
I excerpted this:

# Use the free space on the Windows partition: if Windows is currently the only system on your computer, you have to create free space for Linux data. To do that, you can either delete your Microsoft Windows partition and data (see "Erase entire disk" or "Expert mode" solutions) or resize your Microsoft Windows partition. Resizing can be performed without the loss of any data. The resizing option is recommended if you want to use both Mandrake Linux and Microsoft Windows on same computer. If you choose this option, the size of your Microsoft Windows partition will be reduced. You will have less free space under Microsoft Windows to store your data or to install new software.

HTH
lynch

[trevor1]

ok i just defraged last night and the only new thing on my hdd is yahoo messenger
going forword in the istallation

thanks

[trevor1]

like i said i defragged last night and just now i tried to install mdk and drakx told me that resizing my main partition would erase all data on that partition, what do i do now?

[lynch]

What filesystem is XP running-FAT32 or NTFS?
Didnt think to ask before
lynch

[trevor1]

ntfs

[trevor1]

well im sorry i have had you giving of this wonderfull help,but i found that you cannot resize ntfs filesystem with drakx so its all been in vain and im not spending 60$ for partition magic im now looking at distros that run of a cd how do u like knoppix or demolinux maybe?

[lynch]

I'm sorry I forgot to ask about the filesystem before;could have saved us both a lot of time and trouble
I have Knoppix and I think it's great!
I make copies for people who want to try Linux but dont want to change the way thier hdd is set up.You need at least 128MB of ram for it to work well with X windows.But besides that it works well.If you want to download it,this site has a good bit of info on Linux eval-CDs like Knoppix.There are links to other live-eval CDs too.
HTH
lynch