Well, before I start, let me say that I'm almost, but not quite entirely new to the whole linux thing. I think I successfully installed Red Hat on an old IBM running a K-6 233 about three years ago, but that's as much as I've done. So, it was not without a little bit of intimidation that I started to install this on a computer that sort of evolved from being 'extra space' to being a media PC.

I downloaded the KnoppMyth package, and discovered that Nero didn't want to acknowledge the existence of a CD writer on my computer. Nothing new, that's been going on for a while. So, using Daemon Tools, I mounted the image and simply pulled the files off and burned them with a different program which escapes my memory now. Didn't do anything. No boot disk error, start from scratch. Downloaded CDBurner XP Pro 3 (a piece of freeware google turned up for me) and burned the ISO. Stuck it in, it installs. I wasn't sure if I saw errors or not on the way, it scrolled by pretty quickly. Restart, nothing but a blank screen, with the little blinking cursor at the top. Nothing loaded after the computer's POST. So, stuck the CD back in, to try to reinstall.

'Searching for Boot Record from CDROM.. Failure'

This was to become my entire evening. Unsure about what firefox had been doing, since it appeared to have downloaded to about 50% and called it good, I downloaded again. Burned, searching for boot record, failure. Blinking cursor at the top immediately followed.

So, I decided 'Certainly I could get two bad downloads,' and downloaded off of bittorrent. Same problem. Computer doesn't recognize as a boot CD, loads nothing but a blinking cursor (_) at me. So, despite the fact that it seemed to have worked perfectly well before, I burned it at a slower speed, which, since the drive in the soon-to-be MythTV computer reads slower than my main computer writes, I figured could be a problem.

No such luck. Except it did take a little longer to tell me that the CDROM boot record was not found. It was at this point that I suffered several self-inflicted blows to the head against my desk, and went off in search of another drive. This one was one of the first CD-RWs, and hasn't given me a bit of trouble in over six years. Same problem. So, I burned it at 2x. Still nothing.

At some point in this, I burned a Windows boot CD with the intention of reblanking the hard drive, using PE Builder. Which also didn't work.

Then I updated the firmware on the drive I was burning the discs with, burned another CD at 24x, and tried it.

'Searching for Boot Record from CDROM..' took half an hour to go away and be replaced by, you guessed it, a blinking cursor. I know this because I've spent that time reading through these forums looking for a problem approximating mine.

The machine I'm using is a cobbled-together mass of parts. I'm using a Hercules 64 video card, with a 160 gig Seagate Barracuda hard drive. The CD drive that's failing to read the discs is a TDK something or other (24/10/40 are the vitals), and the one that's writing them is a Samsung 252s. It's an Athlon XP 1800+ processor with god knows what motherboard, and an ATI Wonder (Not all-in-wonder, I made sure there was a distinction before i opened the thing). Pro tuner card.

HE;LP

Did you change the drive you were writing the cd with or the one trying to boot? sounds like the tdk may be the problem. can you use th known good drive to burn and install?

You could also try to boot off the CD on the machine that you are burning it with.

I question the integrity of the drive you are burning with as you stated that Nero no longer detects it as a burner.

_________________
Girkers

Hi,

Also ensure that you are burning the cd as an iso, not a data storage. For a good way start to ensure all is well, get an iso from dsl ( http://damnsmalllinux.org ) as it is only 50 meg, and is knoppix at the heart. If you can boot from that, then you will know how to make it boot from KnoppMyth.

Mike

Well, that was certainly odd. Just got home, oh, ten minutes ago or so, and decided to swap the CD-RW drives around. Put the old one in this computer, and put the one that had evidently been giving me trouble with burning the discs on the floor. Turned on my main computer, and it started the install. "That's certainly odd," I thought, and plugged the really old burner (Christmas gift, burns at up to a blazing 6x, 2x RW, cost $350) in. I had tried this yesterday, but today it worked.

So, it would appear that nothing was wrong and I just dreamed whatever messed up stuff happened last night. Which is also odd, because it means I also dreamed signing up for an internet forum and typing out an entertaining and informative (for the genre) help post. I can hope it means I dreamed oversleeping and being late for work.