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LINUX won't install on Emachine.

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9 replies

by e30ric

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I have an old Emachine (600is) with WIN Me on it that's been sitting around unused (its got WIN Me on it) for a while and I would like to get some use out of it. I have little experience with LINUX so I thought I'd get some by installing Fedora 2 on the Emachine. After getting a friend to download the four (4) iso files required for installation and burning them to four (4) CDs, I popped the first one into the CD drive on the Emachine, rebooted, and ... nothing. The Emachine will not boot from the Fedora CD. It will boot from the CD for other applications (such as the WIN Me restore CD), but won't seem to recognize the LINUX CD.
I e-mailed support at Emachines and was informed that although there are no restrictions to installing LINUX on my machine, Emachines will only support the operating system that came with the 600is.
I have checked all the settings in my BIOS (which is four [4] years old by the way) and they seem to be correct.
I don't really have a clue as to what to try next.
Please. Help!

9 replies

by apotheon

If it won't recognize the CD as bootable media at all, the problem is probably with the way the CD was burned. ISOs are not burned to CD the same way that normal data files are. Different CD-burning tools have different ways of making the ability to burn a CD from ISO to make it bootable, but usually they involve terms like "make disk from image" or "burn image to disk". When burning CDs from ISO, you need to ensure that you use the correct disk-burning option.

Find a Windows machine and look at the CD from within Windows Explorer. If the CD was burned properly, it will probably be unreadable to Windows or, if it's readable, it will not have an ISO file on it. If it was incorrectly burned, you'll probably just see one large ISO file on the disk.

by house

To add to apotheon's answer...are you sure you didn't get the source cd's? Also, were they for the x86 platform?

Try the cd on another machine. If it boots, then at least you narrowed it down to your machine.

by aceskaraoke

Would suspect your CD's first. Linux has, in my experience, always been at least as likely to install and run on any machine as Windows. If your machine came preinstalled with ME, its age shouldn't be a factor in installing Linux, though depending on the actual configuration Fedora may run a bit slow.

by jaqui

boot the emachine into windows, put the cd into the cdrom.
the autoplay should kick in.
put blank floppy into drive.
burn cdrom.img to floppy with raw-write
(should be a link in autorun, if not look in dosutils directory on the cd)
leaving floppy in drive, reboot.

canna figure why everyone forgets that all distro's offer floppy boot images for any installation type, including installing while downloading from ftp mirror.
as well as the raw write tool to burn the boot images to floppy.

by josh7892

You need to burn the ISO's as an image, what your friend did was probably just copy them as a single data file onto each cd. If you use Nero it's very simple just go to ""Recorder -> Burn image"" load the ISO file and burn.

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