ISO burn questions.

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Hi,

I used to use RH Linux years ago and am now in the process of trying to install RHL desktop onto my old vista laptop. Right now I have no machines with Linux on it so bear that in mind here.

Also note that I am burning the files on my other machine which has Windows 7 on it. I followed the instructions on burning the ISO to a DVD. No problem there. My laptop BIOS is set to first boot off of the DVD drive. But when I have the disk in the DVD drive it reads the disk for a few seconds and then goes right into windows.

Years ago I had this same issue. I think the problem was that just having the ISO burned to the disk was not sufficient. I think I had to extract the files, burn them to the DVD and then the machine could boot up and install the software. I think this is the problem here. I am not seeing any option under Windows 7 to extract those files as I think I need.

Question 1: Am I on the right track with my thinking?
Question 2: If I need to extract the files, how on earth do I do it in Windows 7?

Responses

What software did you use to burn the ISO? Something like CdburnerXP or ISOburner? They usually have verification steps there as well.

Some Windows tools require the user to specify a boot image or make DVD/CD bootable, if you forget it creates a data disk that can only be used to create a yum repository.

So please check your ISO burn software.

The published RedHat Enterprise Linux .ISO files are definitely bootable.

Most CD/DVD burning programs have a specific function for image files, usually named "Burn Image" or something similar. When you select it, the burning program will ask you to select one CD/DVD image file (usually the options include .ISO, and perhaps a .BIN/.CUE file pair, and possibly one or more of the more obscure CD/DVD image formats), and when you do so, it should be immediately ready to start burning. Once complete, you should have a DVD whose root directory can be seen - in Windows as well as in Linux - to contain several directories and files.

On a modern RHEL installation DVD, there should be at least "isolinux" and "EFI" directories for traditional and UEFI-based boot, respectively, and a Packages directory that contains all the RPM packages.

The most common error in burning the ISO to a DVD is to select it for burning just like any other type of a file. That will result in a DVD with only the selected .ISO file in its root directory - and that is not going to be bootable.

Extracting the ISO and burning the individual files, while making the necessary settings to make the resulting DVD bootable would be the extra-hard way to do it, I suppose. It is not supported by RedHat and should only be necessary if you need to create an installation media that contains storage drivers newer than already included to the standard distribution and cannot or would rather not supply them on a separate driver media. (Using a separate driver media IS supported by RedHat, while customizing the standard installation media isn't.)

There is a completely free CD/DVD burning program for Windows, called ImgBurn: http://www.imgburn.com/

Please refer to the first screenshot on this webpage: http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=screenshots

When burning a RedHat installation DVD from an ISO image using ImgBurn, you should select "Write image file to disc", NOT "Write files/folders to disc".

Thanks Matti. This worked and I was able to get the OS up and running. The only glitch is that after downloading and installing imgburn two new viruses popped up on my computer. Luckily my virus software took care of it.

A quick hint - when installing anything on Windows coming from external sources, never use the default installation option but the custom one. A lot of software contains ads which may be detected by your antivirus software.

So the authors and/or distributors have added an ad pusher or something worse to the ImgBurn installer - shame on them.

Anyway, your regular CD/DVD burning program will very likely have a similar function for burning CD/DVD image files. It might be buried deeper into "advanced functionality", but I'm pretty confident it will be in there somewhere.

Is it possible that Windows is in hibernation state ? Turn off hibernation mode - open command prompt as administrator and execute powercfg /h off. Shutdown the machine completely - do NOT reboot the system. Turn on the machine and boot from the DVD. :)

Doesn't Win 7 have built-in burning capability? If burning an official RHEL ISO, it will burn as bootable media. But, that said, with cheap DVDs, sometimes they don't mesh well with the burners and you get funny results. Especially if the DVD-BURNER hardware is too old (firmware).

Just some thoughts. Good luck.

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