ISO not bootable after burn:

[flyboydale54]

I downloaded Fedora 17 Live CD ISO, and burned it using Nero 9 Essentials that came with my new Plextor DVD/CD Burner. I tried the Fedora 16 Live CD ISO also. Results were the same with both versions of Fedora. It appears it just takes the ISO image file (.iso) and copies it to the CD. There is only one file visible and that is the ISO file. If I click on the ISO file, it opens the burn screen in NERO. If I try to boot to the CD, it only loads XP Pro 64-bit off of my hard drive. I changed the BIOS so it boots from the CD. Am I doing something wrong? Does the ISO file need unzipping or something? My UBUNTU Live CD or you can install from it has folders and files visible when I look at them using MY Computer. I am getting two different viewpoints in my research on this problem. Some say the ISO image file is always bootable and does not need to be unzipped or unpacked, however there are others saying you must unpack it first and they list free unzipping programs for Linux files. I look at the size of the file on the CD and it is about 648MB in size. If I need to unzip it first, then will it be larger than what will fit on the CD-R disc? What am I doing wrong?

[rcgreen]

In your burning software, there should be an option to burn
an ISO "as an image".
When successfully done, the cd should not
have the ISO file on it, but many files, and it will be bootable.

Do not choose "make the disk bootable", choose
"as an image".

[MikeTbob]

Moving thread to appropiate section.

Try right clicking on the iso and see if there is an option to burn as iso image as mention by rcgreen.

[oz]

Hello and welcome aboard!

You can check the following HowTo for the proper steps to get the job done:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/ins...ll-cd-dvd.html

[Exheon]

I use ImgBurn to burn iso images on Windows, is a nice tool
you can get it from the official website, for free

[MikeTbob]

I use ImgBurn to burn iso images on Windows, is a nice tool
you can get it from the official website, for free

The Official ImgBurn Website
And there it is.

[flyboydale54]

In your burning software, there should be an option to burn
an ISO "as an image".
When successfully done, the cd should not
have the ISO file on it, but many files, and it will be bootable.

Do not choose "make the disk bootable", choose
"as an image".

I tried everything everyone pointed me to, most I tried before I posted on the forum about successful burns but the CD-r would not work for the Live Fedora Linux.

What I found was the files I downloaded including the one straight from Fedora Web Page was not right for some reason. There was varying file sizes as well as "Not Supported Format". Even the Live Fedora 64 was from 200+MB to 600-650MB in size depending on where I downloaded if from and all ended in (.iso). Some burned successfully, but kept the same file name ending in (.iso). But they would not boot and examining the CD-r disc just showed the (.iso) file and no other files nor would it allow you to do anything with the file either. I examined my UBUNTU Live CD and that was burned from the downloaded (.iso) image file but it had a bunch of files and folders on it and it was boot-able. Live and learn the hard way, LOL.

My solution was to find another web site that was a "FTP" site and I downloaded the entire Fedora 17 Linux as a DVD iso file. It was the correct size when finished downloading and I just right clicked in Win7 and clicked burn, and presto, Fedora 17 booted and allowed me to install the complete Linux Fedora 17 operating system.

The real problem is that several sites are not giving us the right file, or should I say a file that was never designed to work in the first place. I did nothing wrong except trusted the download direct from Fedora's web page as well as a few more web sites that offered the Fedora 17 Live CD. Just because someone allows me to download a file that is supposed to be a working file, does not mean it will work. No wonder so many people give up on Linux. I should have known that as soon as I entered a UNIX driven site that had the file for Fedora 17 for DVD that it was going to work as soon as I saw that the entire 3.6GB was downloaded, instead of a partial file size such as with the LIVE CD one. Again I was going with the recommendations to download, burn an ISO image of it and boot to it then install the full Fedora if I liked it from the DVD one that I also downloaded, for simplifying the install there was supposed to be an icon on the desktop that was supposed to load the full version. Bottom Line, it does not get any easier than the full DVD one, only 2 choices after it boots and one is to INSTALL, LOL.

Thank you everyone, I appreciated your help.

Now to learn as much as I can about Linux, so I can at least breeze around in it as fluently as Windows XP and Vista.

Are there movie type clips I can watch that would help bring me up to speed on how to master Linux?

[drl]

Hi.

Welcome to the forum. I'm glad to hear that you got what you wanted.

Just now I downloaded the 686 live desktop iso as well as the x86_64 live desktop iso from Fedora Project Homepage and both appear to be the right size: 646 and 645 MB respectively. I was only checking to see if I could replicate your report of differing sizes, so I did not burn the images.

It's possible that there was some some error at the web site, but if so it appears to be working correctly now.

As an aside: if one is using a hypervisor like VMWare or VirtualBox, then one can boot directly from the ISO file into a guest without needing to burn the image onto a CD or DVD.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl

[drl]

Hi.

Responding to a private message:

Sorry, but it will not let me post this on the thread. Says I must have 15 posts before it will allow me to post to a URL, http, etc....

DRL:

This is where the problem began. I downloaded (x86_64 live desktop iso from Fedora Project Homepage), and the size of the file is as you stated, but if you burn it to CD-R, it only burns the original file ending in (.iso). I followed the instructions for burning the file and it ended up with only the original (.iso) file on the burned disc. This was not bootable at all, nor could I do anything with it. In fact when I clicked on it to see if I could possibly open it or something, it used "Nero 9 Essentials" and immediately opened the Nero Disc Burning Program. I did not choose any options to make the disc burnable as others stated not to do. I followed the instructions exactly that I found on the Fedora Web Page after searching for the instructions to see if I was doing something wrong. Normally I would have used my Nero5 Full Program, but I did not install it to my New PC Build yet because I did not know if it was compatible with Win7 Ultimate 64-bit or not. The reason I used the Nero 9 Essentials is because it came with my new Plextor DVD Burner (PX-L890SA) I installed into my new build along with the new Plextor DVD Blue Ray Burner Drive (PX-LB950SA). Plextor support told me that Nero 9 Essentials supports burning ISO Images. I even tried to burn it using the new Blue Ray Drive, with the same results. At that time I was using the newly installed Win XP Pro 64-bit Operating System. After my Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit OS arrived and I installed it, that is when I began searching for alternate sites to download Fedora 17 from. This is when I found an FTP site that hosted the download and I downloaded the full Fedora 17 DVD ISO 64-bit. I tried another method as suggested of right clicking on the file using Win 7 by right clicking the file and clicking burn, and presto, it burned and worked perfectly.

The steps I used to originally burn the CD-R for the Live Fedora 17 disc are below:
1. Open Nero as follows:
Start > All Programs > Nero 7 Essentials > Data > Nero Express Essentials

2. Click on "Data DVD" or "Data CD" (either one should work...this step doesn't seem to make much sense if you're creating an ISO from files in C:\ drive......)

3. Click "Add"

4. Select the file(s) or folder you wish to make an ISO image from (note: you can select an entire drive like D:\ if you want)

5. Click "Add"

6. Click "Close"

7. Click "Next"

8. Set Current recorder: Image Recorder[DVD]

9. Click "Burn"

10. Enter a filename and specify ISO as the file type.

11. Click "Save"

12. Click "Burn"

Again, this only resulted in the same original (.iso) file being burned to the CD-R with the same file size of 645MB. Thank you for your reply DRL. The burn is what does not work, not the copying of the file. There was other sites I tried downloading from after that which only resulted in file size of around 200+MB.

The instructions on the Fedora web site for Windows, Mac, and Linux at Chapter*3.*Making Media seem to address the issue of burning the image as opposed to burning a copy of the file. It mentioned Nero and Roxio, both of which I have used successfully, albeit some time ago. However, I don't know if those steps would have solved your problem or not.

By now you have probably realized that an iso file is a kind of baggage format, like zip, or, in the *nix world, ar, tar, etc. Such files contain other files, bundled together. So when you burn the image, the individual files are unpacked, and they are written to the CD / DVD / etc. (That's what makes the VM option to boot directly from an iso, without that intermediate step, so attractive.)

My view of issues like this is that learning is not always easy, but when you finally solve a problem, one will have learned well. In my experience, this often happens when one encounters a situation that seems similar to that with which one is familiar, but turns out to be quite different. Different terms contribute to the issue as well.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl