[NBLUG/talk] Update on Linux education, part 2

[Roger House]

Well, I have been making progress, slowly but surely.  I spent a fair
amount of time finding out about the BIOS, motherboard, etc., etc., on my
old computer, and finally bought a 256MB DIMM from HSC in Rohnert Park.  
I plugged it in, and, presto, I had double the memory I started with.  

There are three memory slots, two with 128MB DIMMs which came with the
system when I bought it, and one with the new 256MB DIMM I just added.  If
I replace the two 128MB boards with two 256MB boards I can get the RAM up
to the max possible, namely 768MB.  However, for now I am will see how the
512MB works.

I next went to Red Hat's website and downloaded 6 CD images for Fedora
Core 5 and burned the images onto 6 CD's.  I was about to begin installing
when it suddenly occurred to me that I had never retreived all files of
interest from the old machine when I semi-retired it a couple of years
ago.  (One could argue that if I hadn't missed the files for two years,
maybe they could just as well disappear ...)  So I spent several hours
pulling files off the old machine.

Now, I am ready to install FC-5.  I start reading the Installation Guide
at http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/fc5/ and eventually
reach the section "Booting from CD, DVD, or USB Media" at
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/fc5/ch-beginninginstallation.html#sn-booting-from-disc

I put the first disk in the CD drive and start the computer.  The usual
stuff scolls across the screen culminating in

    BOOT FROM ATAPI CD-ROM

    ISOLINUX 3.10 2005-08-24


There is a rather long pause, and then "ioslinux:" appears, so the last
line on the screen now reads

    ISOLINUX 3.10 2005-08-24  isolinux:

Now problems arise:  As soon as I press a key on the keyboard, the machine
reboots from scratch, as if I had powered down and then powered back 
up.  It
always returns to the line above, at which point pressing a key starts
the reboot over again.

I should mention that the screen does not look anything like what the 
Fedora
Installation Guide shows (see the URL above), nor does a "boot:" prompt
appear.

Any ideas about what to do?

Thanks in advance,

Roger