help burning linux liveos iso!

[Yarin]

I downloaded the fedora-linux-os iso. Then I tried burning that iso to a CD, but the CD is too small, then I try a DVD, but Nero says the iso can only be burned on a CD.
So now I figure I need to burn a selected few files from the iso to the CD. But I don't know which ones they are, and I don't want to waste CD after CD trying to figure it out.
Here is the FS of the iso:

Fedora-8-Live-KDE-x86_64.iso

isolinux (folder)
vesamenu.c32
boot.cat
initrd0.img
isolinux.bin
isolinux.cfg
memtest
splash.jpg
vmlinuz0
LiveOS (folder)
livecd-iso-to-disk
osmin.img
squashfs.img
GPL
README

I already read several files (including the readme file) and they're not helping me! Please help!

[Elysia]

Get rid of Nero and get get ImgBurn. Nero is just bloatware these days.

[vart]

Get rid of Nero and get get ImgBurn. Nero is just bloatware these days.

I like Nero

[vart]

Then I tried burning that iso to a CD, but the CD is too small
I hope You didn't try to burn it as a file? And use "Burn Image to disk" option? Even if the iso file is slightly bigger than 700M it still should fit the 700M CDR

[Elysia]

I like Nero

I liked Nero too, one upon a time. But starting with v7, it's just crap, bloat, and buggy crapware.

[JFonseka]

I agree with Elysia, it's way too large nowadays, got too many features for the average user and crashes inadvertently by causing illegal operations (quite regularly in the later versions)

CloneCD and ImgBurn are by far the best simple burners.

Also, remember to do a md5 checksum of the file before burning, otherwise you are going to have fun when it's halfway installing and there is an error, also check the cd after burning with the fedora tools before installing

[dwks]

Basically, you have to burn it as an image. You can't just copy all of the files to the disk and try to burn it.

Also, try to use a good-quality CD. Using cheap CDs and (especially) DVDs, I sometimes have to burn six or seven of them before I get a good disk.

Note that if the disks are bad in different places, you can get to the bad place, swap out CDs, and choose "try again", and Linux won't know the difference. Oftentimes the disks go bad in exactly the same places, however, due to hardware flaws. Using disks from different packages helps.

Really, if you think about it, what are the chances of burning 700MB of data without messing up a single bit? It's amazing you ever get good disks at all. :)

[maxorator]

I haven't had any problems with Nero 7... I agree it's bloatware but it does everything I want it to do.

Some older CDs are smaller btw.

[Elysia]

I haven't had any problems with Nero 7... I agree it's bloatware but it does everything I want it to do.

I have just had a lot of troubles with Nero 7. It always ejects the Tray when a something fails, which is just plain annoying (Nero 6 had the option to turn that off). It also didn't want to burn properly. Not to mention you have to download everything just to use the burner.
The "sweetness" of the GUI sucks. The filelist is so darn buggy.

In short, it's a downgrade from Nero 6.

[brewbuck]

Really, if you think about it, what are the chances of burning 700MB of data without messing up a single bit? It's amazing you ever get good disks at all. :)

Back in 1994 when a CD burner cost $1000 our gaggle of local geeks used to hold "burn fests" where we'd try to swap as much data between each other as possible over the course of a single, very rowdy night. With 1x burn speeds this obviously required multiple CDR drives to be practical.

50% of the discs came out as coasters.

Did I mention rowdiness? One drunk guy managed to walk right into the extended CD tray of one of the burner drives, snapping it off. These days you'd buy a new burner. Those days, it was heart-attack inducing. Imagine a crowd of 15 geeks crammed into a dark basement hovering over a brightly lit table like something out of the X-Files, with this thousand dollar burner disassembled in pieces, trying to fix the tray drive mechanism. We scavanged a tray and some gears from a standard CD-ROM drive and put the thing back together. It worked.

[Yarin]

I have tried burning the whole image, thats the very first thing I did, and it said the disk was to small.

I've had nero for several versions, and I've been okay with it. (although I do agree that their GUI sucks). But using nero can't be the problem could it?

[Elysia]

Sure it could. I was able to burn a Linux DVD with ImgBurn without any problems. Nero is riddled with problems nowadays. Why don't you try another application and see if it works?

[maxorator]

I've burned many different linux DVDs and CDs without any problems (with Nero 7). :rolleyes:

[Elysia]

Again, doesn't hurt.

[Jaqui]

Yarin,
you are using a 700 mb iso and a 700 mb cd?
a 700 mb iso and a 650 mb cd will give that error.

also, check to make sure overburning is enabled, for the one or two mb extra for diskclosing that burning requires.

[Yarin]

No, I'm burning a 750 - 850 mb iso on a 700 mb cd.

I'll try download and using ImgBurn, but I doubt it will make any difference.

[Elysia]

Oh, it's pretty helpful in asking you if something goes wrong.
But you are bordering on something that doesn't work here, seeing as the image is bigger than your CD...

[CornedBee]

Says on the download page: "Live DVD"

So obviously you need to burn the image to a DVD.

If Nero doesn't want to burn the image to a DVD, you'll need a different burn client.

[Yarin]

I checked out ImgBurn, and it let me burn the iso on a DVD, all fine.
But now when I try to boot the live os, nothing happens. The computer boots as if though there was no disk in the drive at all. (And yes, the BIOS is set to boot from the CD/DVD-ROM before the harddrive)
Any ideas why this isn't working?

[dwks]

Is it a DVD image or not? A DVD image might be up to 4GB, and certainly more than 700MB.

What happens when you check the DVD? I don't know about ImgBurn, but most CD/DVD burning software lets you check the checksums of the burned data and the original image to see if it was burned correctly.

You are burning the image as an iso image, right?

The computer boots as if though there was no disk in the drive at all. (And yes, the BIOS is set to boot from the CD/DVD-ROM before the harddrive)
Does it whirr up the DVD drive to see if there's a disk in there first? If not, your settings are probably wrong. If it does, the disk is probably bad in some way.

[mike_g]

You might want to set the burn as 'bootable' most burners give the option to do this. I foun a nice simple app for doing this today: http://isoburn.sourceforge.net/ As i just got my new eeepc in the post; chucked eeeXubuntu on it. Good fun :)

[Elysia]

Eh, if the ISO itself is bootable, burning it to a medium will, indeed, make it bootable.

[Vicious]

Thanks Elysia. You're a * master! How the hell do you know every thing?

Does that count as 9? ^_^

[Elysia]

Nope.

[heras]

Eh, if the ISO itself is bootable, burning it to a medium will, indeed, make it bootable.
That is not true.

[Elysia]

This is so true. I have done it many times on ImgBurn. With Windows XP CDs, and with a Linux DVD, as well.

[heras]

Your milage may vary.

[Yarin]

Okay, I burned Fedora-8-Live-KDE-x86_64.iso directly to the DVD using ImgBurn's burn image option. ImgBurn also successfully verified the data on the disk too. And I did assume (like Elysia said) that being a bootable iso, it would be a bootable DVD.

The drive does whirr and rumble, and the startup is delayed by a few seconds, so it does see the DVD, it's just not booting off of it.

[vart]

and the startup is delayed by a few seconds
don't you need to press somekey during this delay to actually boot from the disk?
and have you set proper booting order in bios?

[Yarin]

No, my custom bootdisk I made, and the windows setup bootdisk both work without me having to press a key. The reason the delay occurs (I'm assuming) is because it's check to see if it should boot off the disk it sees in the drive.

And the boot order in my BIOS is: CD/DVD rom, main hd, second hd, usb sticks, others...

[dwks]

It's probable that your DVD is bad, in that case. If you followed a process much like this one (http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial114.html), I'd try downloading the ISO again. It could have been corrupted when you downloaded it, you never know.

The Windows setup bootdisk is a DVD, not a CD, right? Perhaps your system can boot from CDs but not DVDs.

[Yarin]

>> The Windows setup bootdisk is a DVD, not a CD, right? Perhaps your system can boot from CDs but not DVDs.
I've though about that, but my computer is a 2006 system, shouldn't it easily have DVD boot support being so new?

[Yarin]

>>I'd try downloading the ISO again.
I would, but it was hard enough to get the iso as it was. (I'm on dial-up)

[maxorator]

Check the MD5 checksum.

[dwks]

>> The Windows setup bootdisk is a DVD, not a CD, right? Perhaps your system can boot from CDs but not DVDs.
I've though about that, but my computer is a 2006 system, shouldn't it easily have DVD boot support being so new?
No, in my Googling I found a few examples where this was the case . . . usually with specific models of drives/computers, but it still can happen.

Anyway. Either this is the case, or your image is probably corrupted. If it's corrupted you'll need to download it again eventually, but for now let's just assume the disk is fine . . . .

I've booted into Linux CDs on systems that could not boot from CDs. I can't imagine that booting into a DVD on a system that didn't support it would be any different. However, for the method I have in mind to work, you need to have a floppy drive. Do you? If so, try searching for "linux boot floppy". You can probably use rawrite.exe (in tools/rawrite.zip or something) to create a floppy disk which can then examine your system for a DVD drive and boot off of that . . . but only if you have a floppy disk.

Alternatively, you could get a CD image. You know your computer can boot CDs, after all. This might be difficult on dial-up, though.

[Elysia]

But hopefully there's a torrent of the Linux distro floating out there somewhere. That way you could only download the corrupted parts, if any. It's worth a try if you can find one. Downloading a CD/DVD on dial-up is painful, I know.

[Yarin]

I don't have a floppy drive in my computer, but I do have a different one (real old $50 machine) that has a floppy, but it can't read DVDs.
I was thinking, does any one of you have a linux CD/DVD that you wouldn't mind sending me a good copy of?

[mike_g]

You could always request a free Ubuntu CD

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu

[Yarin]

Okay, I've done that. I hope this goes through. It shouldn't be so sickening hard just to get my hands on linux. :(

[abh!shek]

You can also buy (http://www.linuxcd.org/view_distro.php?id_distro=118&ref=distrowatch) the discs.

[dwks]

As I dial-up user myself, I bought Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 on a few DVDs from somewhere in Thunder Bay. They shipped it by mail to me. It took a long time, but that was mostly because I wanted the AMD64 version, which wasn't officially supported in 3.1. (It was pretty cheap, though -- I think about $20.)

You could buying the disks if you are reasonably serious about Linux. It means that you get a full distribution, which is invaluable with a slow connection. Even now I keep the full installation DVDs (not CDs, it's hard to mount more than 8 CDs) on my hard drive so that I can install whatever I like whenever I like.

But I would try to download the disks at a high-speed connection somewhere. A friend's house, a library -- you should be able to find a place where you can do it. It will take far less time, and you'll save some money too . . . .

Though I would recommend keeping the original images, too, in case the disks are bad. Downloading disks again isn't fun, as you have discovered.

Another suggestion: you could download something like Puppy Linux (http://www.puppylinux.org/user/downloads.php?cat_id=1). It's less than a hundred megabytes, which might be palletable (sp?) option. It's not a very satisfying distribution, because they couldn't fit all that much into so little space -- but it's a nice way to start.

[abh!shek]

http://www.slitaz.org/en/