Installation

Help! What am I doing wrong.

I am trying to install the generic-pc-1.235.iso image on a computer hard drive.

The computer has been running windows XP and boots up normally. When I try to overwrite XP with the monowall image, the computer start to boot up then gives a disk read error.

I have tried installing monowall with physdiskwrite, with Darn Small Linux, I have tried wiping the disk with various wiping programs and installing again and always get the same result - read error

I have tried installing DSL on the hard drive. Boots OK. Overwrite this with the monowall image using DSL from the CD - same result.

Monowall boots OK on this computer from a live disk but I want to get it on the hard drive. What do I try next? Any suggestions?

The iso image is not meant to be installed to a hard drive. It is meant to be burned onto a CD ROM.

Use the correct image file if you want it on a hard drive, ie generic-pc-1.235.img

My apologies. I misled you.

Typing too fast. I meant to say that I am using the image file - generic-pc.1.235.img - not the iso file.

So thanks for the advice but because the question was wrong, the answer didn't help.

So back to the real question, Why can't I boot after installing the image file onto a computer that was running XP. It is not the disk because I now have 3 computers all doing the same thing!

Have you verified the MD5 or SHA hash of the image you downloaded? Wouldn't be the first time a bad image was being used.

Beyond that I don't have any more ideas.

Hi

I have used several different downloads, especially when using the Darn Small Linux technique which requires a new download each time.

It appears to be a boot problem. I get an Intel boot first which then results in a disk read error. I believe there is a hidden boot partition that Microsoft puts on the disk. How do I get rid of that.

Use fdisk to examine the disk for any partitions you suspect are interfering and delete them. But I don't think you'll find anything there - physdiskwrite should have wiped the whole disk clean when it wrote the image.

If you see an Intel Boot Rom loading, you might have onboard chipset RAID or AHCI enabled.
Be sure to set the onboard chipset to Legacy/ IDE mode rather than RAID/ AHCI mode before trying to boot from the disk.