booting from CD problem with 4.9

I have a fairly old second PC which I'm messing around with at the moment. Have installed Win XP and Redhat 9 by successfully booting from the CD drive.
I then tried to install Lindows 4.5 which couldn't boot from CD.
THEN i tried booting FreeBSD 4.9 which didn't work either.

Shall I just use 5.2 as this uses a similar cd emulation technqiue to XP?
As stated above, there is nothing wrong with the Cd drive or the cds I'm using. Is it possibly an age thing?

Thanks in advance

poncenby

When you burn CD's from the ISO images, make sure that you enable the CD to be bootable. If your boot order is correctly set in your BIOS and all the CD's have been burned in the same way, it should not make a difference which OS is on the CD. As is noted on FreeBSD's website, you can download floppy disk images which will enable you to start installation and download packages on the fly. Perhaps that method will work for you.

The OS does not, but the boot image technique does.

There is two ways to create a bootable CD:
- Floppy emulation (limited to 2.88MB afaik)
- Hard disk emulation (unlimited space).

#1 is more compatible. For #2, you need a recent BIOS to support it.

I think I read something about FreeBSD (5?) using #2, so this probably is the problem here. Check the release notes on www.freebsd.org .

Easiest solution would be, like mttatkns suggested, using the boot floppies and not worry about CD booting at all

hth,
M.