.iso Not Booting Even After Boot Configuration

[tp444]

Hello all,

My first post and I hope to become a part of the Gentoo community in weeks to come. Already, though, I've had trouble with the very simple issue of loading the burned CD with the .iso "install-x86-minimal-20130423"

Albeit, my Linux experience is literally zero, this seems like a seemingly more simple issue that I'm a little embarassed about. When I boot the CD, a simple underscore in the top left of the screen shows up, then loads Windows 7 Home Premium a few seconds afterwards. :\

Any help with this is appreciated. Hopefully there aren't any specific threads just as mine that I couldn't find in the search that make this somewhat of a duplicate. Thanks in advance.

[jeracho]

Hello there.

Let me ask, did you set the CD-ROM drive as the first bootable drive in your BIOS?

[tp444]

Just I did, and as a computer tech. it's embarassing that I'm unsure why it just dead boots at that underscore in the top left without proceeding into the Gentoo installation.

Is only the .iso necessary to be burned? I'm running on a Toshibo laptop with a Pentium P6200, 2.13 GHz laptop, 64 bit architecture (not that this should matter). So maybe something is missing from the burned CD or there is a problem with the .iso. My BIOS seems to be configured perfectly as I checked twice that the boot loading sequence correct with CD/DVD as the initial boot.

Thank you for the very quick response.

Hopefully I can figure this out on my own. Finding out about the Windows NSA "malware" issue was the straw that broke this camel's back.

[jeracho]

No problem, I'm here to help. ^_^

Anyway, since you have the BIOS configured correctly and have double-checked it I am going to assume that something went wrong burning the .iso to the CD. When you burned the .iso did you set the burning speed to the lowest possible setting? If you burn things like Linux distro .iso files at the max burning speed, they are unlikely to burn to the disc correctly.

[slackline]

You can install Gentoo from any live Linux disc, you don't have to use the minimal one. So if you've another (e.g. Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Knoppix, SysRescueCD etc.) lying around boot from that and install from there (everything else is the same, you have to create mount points, re-parrtition your hard drive and mount them, download tarballs of portage etc. etc.).
_________________
"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer.  Art is everything else we do." - Donald Knuth

[tp444]

Well, unfortunately I took the advice of jeracho and was still unable to boot from the CD with the Gentoo minimal x86 .iso.

I'm not sure what to do at this point although the other replier, slackline, mentioned using another live Linux disc of which I do not have.

I'll have to refer to the handbook again to try and get down to this. Is partitioning the drive prior to booting necessary? Not that it would affect it booting up.

Any other ideas are appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[likewhoa]

did you burn the iso with disk-on-write mode? are you able to boot it from within virtualbox just to test that the cdrom actually works? please test on another system to rule out your bios, try it in virtualbox.

[jeracho]

[Section_8]

When you burned the CD with the .iso, did you burn it as an image? Whatever utility you used to burn the CD should have a function that burns an image to CD. If you just copied the .iso file to the CD, like any other file, the CD isn't bootable.

If you look at the CD with windows explorer, and just see the .iso file on it, it wasn't burned as an image and isn't bootable.

[jeracho]